It was distributed every Thursday, and was published by the San Francisco Print Media Company.

SF Weekly was founded locally in the late 1970s by Christopher Hildreth and Edward Bachman and originally named San Francisco Music Calendar, the Magazine or Poster Art.

[1][11] The annual SF Weekly Music Awards were based on a popular vote for nominees[12] and were announced in October at the Warfield Theatre.

[13][14] SF Weekly was the subject of ethical controversy in January 2006, when a column about the AVN Awards misidentified the event's location and honorees.

[15][16] In July 2015, after Matt Saincome wrote Counting Cards at Graton Casino,[17] the casino notified SF Weekly of its intention to pull tens of thousands of dollars in ad buys; the publisher of SF Weekly, Glenn Zuehls, reportedly demanded that SF Weekly staff remedy the advertiser with a favorable cover story, by directly assigning the story to a reporter.