"Dateline San Francisco" --

It is a tale of two cities. It's a city of very rich people and very poor people. A Dungeness crab of a city. A city losing its soul. Sleek, black Uber cars that whisk hipsters from bar to bar. Danielle Steel's hedge. Thirteen-dollar sandwiches. Google Glass.

That's your opening paragraph, visiting journalists. You're welcome.

It's our effort to help our brethren who have flocked here to write the latest "How the tech boom is changing San Francisco" opus. (All of the lines in that opening paragraph have actually been published in previous San Francisco/tech boom opuses. Special thanks to you, Guardian U.K.)

In Twitterspeak, #SanFranciscoThinkPiece would be trending. Go ahead, you can use that line.

We know why you're here. Your editors want the story, it's freezing where you're from and you want that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expense a night at Mission Control, the sex club for techies.

So we've assembled a Cut-and-Paste San Francisco Trend Story. Complete with actual sources. The next time New York, London or Washington, D.C., appears to be losing its soul to a gaggle of hoodied dorks with no social skills, we expect the same courtesy.

Step 1: Fly into Oakland International Airport, call Uber. If your driver doesn't have a Ph.D. in English literature and at least three ideas for a startup, exit the car and dial Lyft. As you drive to San Francisco, glance to your right so you can make an obligatory Oakland-is-the-new-Brooklyn observation.

-- Premium content points: Reference the way the Port of Oakland cranes resemble the AT-ATs from "The Empire Strikes Back," a film by early technologist and guy-who-will-never-return-your-calls George Lucas.

Step 2: Get the lay of the land. And by "get the lay of the land," we mean go straight to the Mission District. The bad news: The $4 toast you've heard about is more than a mile away in Alamo Square, which was actually gentrified back in 1967. Instead, tip back a glass of $10 cold-pressed kale/celery/cucumber/parsley juice at a pop-up store on Valencia while you skim Wikipedia on the history of the Ellis Act.

-- Time-saving reporting tip: Ask the person pouring your kale juice which uncool East Bay city they BARTed in from. If they live in Concord, put them in your lead paragraph as someone "searching for their dreams" in the new economy.

Step 3: Find the outrage. Now that you're sufficiently fired up about evictions, it's time to write about the tenant-landlord rift without actually speaking to a greedy landlord or aggrieved tenant. The San Francisco Tenants Union, Tenderloin Housing Clinic or any past/present editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian will gladly confirm that San Francisco is on the verge of doom (just as the naysayers said in 1998 during the first dot-com boom).

-- Premium content points: Mention that the average rent price in the Mission District (as of Jan. 30) is $2,125 per bedroom, three times the national average.

Step 4: Line up your political/tech/celebrity sources. No #SanFranciscoThinkPiece is complete without some hackneyed grandstanding, and boy have you come to the right town. There is no shortage of people who in any other town would be considered Trotskyites, but here we call them "political moderates."

-- For best results on politicians/celebs/techies to call, follow this guide:

-- Famous San Franciscans who will pick up the phone: Willie Brown, Ron Conway, Tyler Florence, Art Agnos, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Avalos, Chicken John, David Campos, Gavin Newsom (for publications with a circulation of 250,000 or more), Third Eye Blind singer Stephan Jenkins.

-- Famous San Franciscans who won't pick up the phone: Robin Williams, Charles R. Schwab, any member of Metallica, Danielle Steel, Gavin Newsom (for publications with a circulation of 250,000 or less), Willie Mays, Jim Harbaugh, Frank Chu.

Step 5: It's Google's fault. The search engine you just used to understand what the hell an Ellis Act eviction means is public enemy No. 1 in some quarters. This makes no sense, but just go with it. Until you leave town, only use Bing when other people can see your laptop. (We don't know its Web address. Just Google "Bing.") Then make sure to name-check the Google Bus, Google Barge and Google Catamaran in your story.

-- Premium content points: Pay a recently evicted Mission District visual artist to record the maiden voyage of the Google Zeppelin. There's no Google Zeppelin, you say? Doesn't matter. Report it anyway. It's not like Google is going to respond on the record.

-- Time-saving reporting tip: Don't bother to call that annoying Google Glass lady who filmed people flipping her off in a Lower Haight bar. Her 15 minutes of fame are up, and she's probably going to comment underneath the online version of your story anyway.

Step 6: Get your adjectives straight. There are decisions to be made. What double-barreled description will you give the Mission? "Gritty and trendy"? "Seedy and hip"? "Vibrant and overpriced"? Is it populated by "Latinos and the technorati"?

-- Premium content bonus points: Make sure your descriptors aren't influenced by any movies and TV shows you've seen that are based in San Francisco. Most were filmed in Vancouver and Los Angeles. (Sad truth: The "Full House" crew could never afford one of the Seven Sisters Victorian mansions. They would be crammed in an in-law unit behind Candlestick.)

Step 7: Know your neighborhood stereotypes. No #SanFranciscoThinkPiece is complete without a reference to the city's famed "diversity," most of it based on 1978 demographics and episodes of "Nash Bridges." Haight = hippies. Tenderloin = junkies. Polk Street = gay. Castro = not as gay as it used to be. Pacific Heights = rich white people. (That one's true.) North Beach = strip clubs/Italians. Cow Palace = new Uber driver made wrong turn. Sunset = no story there.

-- Premium content bonus points: State with authority that Dogpatch is the new Potrero Hill. Bayview is the new Dogpatch. The Excelsior is ... still the Excelsior.

Step 8: Find a villain. Bad guys in San Francisco don't look like Mr. Burns from "The Simpsons." You want someone who looks dorky yet cosmopolitan: a Euronerd. (Go ahead, you can steal that. You know you want to.) He - and it's always a he in the bro culture - is a combination of someone who is (1) rich, (2) smug, (3) has perfect hair and is yet (4) sexually frustrated.

-- Time-saving reporting tip: If a founding member of the Kleiner Perkins venture capital firm doesn't fall into your lap, look on Medium for the latest startup bro who drunk-tweeted after seeing three homeless people out the window on his (lonely) Uber ride home.

Step 9: Overwrought historical references. The story isn't finished without a ham-handed reference to the city's history of cultural reinventions. Barbary Coast. Gold Rush. Summer of Love. Ginsberg and the Beats. The first time the city was doomed by the tech bubble. (RIP Pets.com.)

-- Time-saving reporting tip: State historian and native San Franciscan Kevin Starr has written 7,146 volumes of California history ... and he's waiting by the phone.

-- Premium content bonus points: If you drop a Webvan reference, mention that the company paid for its logo to be on every seat cup holder in the Giants ballpark when it opened in 2000. A year later Webvan declared bankruptcy.

Step 10: Return to Oakland and realize the story is actually here - in the new Brooklyn.

Clarification: A previous online version of this story suggested that the writer of a recent New York Magazine article was from New York. The author lives in Berkeley.