A Voice Is Silenced in San Diego   

When the afternoon San Diego Tribune ceased publication on February 1 to merge with the morning San Diego Union, the transition appeared smooth. The two papers had been jointly owned for almost 90 years, and they shared buildings, advertising, even a photo staff. While more than 180 jobs were lost, mostly in the newsrooms, only 34 employees had to be laid off.

From outward appearances, little was lost in the merger and much was gained.

Readers of the Union continued to receive a heavily zoned morning paper, while former Tribune subscribers still got afternoon home delivery with the day's breaking news. Roughly equal numbers of reporters were retained from each paper and nearly all the columnists, comic strips and special features of both papers were incorporated into the merged product. The Union-Tribune offers expanded business and sports sections and more thorough regional news coverage in a bigger news hole.

But San Diego residents did suffer one major loss – a distinctly different editorial page. For the more than 100,000 readers who stuck with the Tribune until the end, that meant the absence of a less partisan and what some considered a more incisive voice, one that frequently challenged the status quo.

Since its founding in 1868 and through several changes of ownership, the morning Union had maintained a remarkably consistent Republican and pro-business editorial stance. The afternoon Tribune, founded in 1895, was purchased six years later by the Union and adopted a similar approach.

But under Helen Copley, who succeeded her husband James as publisher after his death in 1973, the Tribune editorial board was encouraged to be more independent. It sometimes backed candidates from both parties in general elections, while the Union generally endorsed the straight Republican ticket.

The Tribune editorial page staff often bested the Union staff in competitions and in 1987 won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on immigration by Jonathan Freedman. (The Tribune also won a Pulitzer in 1979 for its coverage of a PSA jetliner crash over San Diego; the Union never won the prize.)

"The difference between the Union and the Tribune was not simply a difference between liberal and conservative, because the Tribune was never really permitted to be liberal," says Freedman, who left the Tribune in 1990 and is currently at work on a book about poverty in America. "The Union is ideologically based, but the Tribune editorials in their prime resulted from a healthy confrontation between reality and ideas."

The editorial policy of the new Union-Tribune will continue the Union's tradition of conveying its owner's Republican philosophy, according to Editor Gerald Warren, former editor of the Union and one-time deputy press secretary to President Nixon. But the former Tribune deputy editor, Robert Witty, was named associate editor and supervises the new paper's editorial and opinion sections, and two editorial writers from the Tribune also have been incorporated into the new editorial board. The merged paper offers two op-ed pages on weekdays – one carrying columnists from the Tribune, the other columnists from the Union.

"What counts is the paper's editorial policy, and it's too soon to tell what that will be," says Ralph Bennett, retired chief editorial writer for the Tribune. "They don't have the Trib anymore to be a counterweight and protect them, so to speak, so they're going to have to be a lot more careful and moderate."

The tradition started by James Copley of offering one paper for the businessman and another "for the working man" served the Copley Press, Inc. well for more than three decades. The Tribune enjoyed larger circulation than its morning rival until 1966, and even after the Union overtook it the Tribune's circulation continued to grow with San Diego, peaking at 133,711 in 1979. But by early 1991 it had fallen below 117,000, while the Union's daily circulation had climbed to more than 271,000.

Copley's San Diego operations have long been considered extremely profitable, although exact figures for the privately held company are unavailable. But a recession-induced drop in advertising cut deeply into the company's profits, according to company insiders, and triggered a hiring freeze in January 1991.

"The Tribune is a wonderful newspaper and it's not that we haven't tried our very best to maintain it as a separate and independent paper," Helen Copley said in announcing the merger. "The excellence of the Tribune and its staff simply has been overcome by changing reading habits."

Copley's management attempted to put a positive spin on the decision. "Economics figured into it, but both papers were closed because we thought we could get better economic penetration in the '90s with a bigger newspaper," says Herbert Klein, editor in chief of Copley Newspapers and a one-time Nixon administration official.

The spin in the two newsrooms was anything but positive, however, as almost 400 reporters and editors waited more than four months to learn their fates. A month after the September 11 merger announcement, the company disclosed it would eliminate as many as 139 of 429 positions in the library, photo lab and newsrooms. Ultimately, 109 editorial employees and 46 from other departments chose to accept the company's buyout offer or take early retirement.

While only 34 people were laid off, many staffers were demoted or reassigned to positions they didn't want. Some agonized over why they had been among the few to lose their jobs: "In the process of searching my brain – and my heart – I'm wondering what I could have done differently," says ex-Tribune reporter Richard Core. "I challenged my editor – maybe that was not taken well."

Employees were not allowed to see the evaluations used in revamping the staff until the week after the merger took effect. They had no opportunity to defend their performance, and most were told their assignments were not negotiable. "The process of the layoffs was handled in a horrible, degrading, dehumanizing way," says Claude Walbert, a Tribune reporter who opted for early retirement.

All the top editors with responsibility for the news departments were chosen from the Union.

As for content, the merged product will emphasize stronger regional coverage in San Diego and Imperial counties as well as northern Baja California, according to Warren. "We feel very strongly our commitment to our zones. There are more people in every bureau."

With little time to prepare for the launch of the new paper, editors scrambled to fill their old sections while learning their new duties, and layout editors tried to prepare for the paper's "new look" (very similar to the Union's old look). Early on February 2, the first copies of the new Union-Tribune rolled off the presses.

Despite some production glitches and reader complaints that the afternoon home-delivered edition did not contain midday stock prices, the new paper was a pleasant surprise to many staffers. "It's much better than I expected it to be," says reporter Jeff Rose. "If we can keep this up, we'll really trounce the [Los Angeles] Times."

Phyllis Pfeiffer, general manager of the Times' San Diego edition, which has a countywide circulation of more than 70,000, says her paper is conducting a major advertising campaign to woo former Tribune subscribers. "It's too soon to tell how many of those readers were diehard afternoon readers and how many were looking for an alternative voice... I think we would be the natural choice [for the latter]."

There are no signs that the Union-Tribune is losing subscribers. Preliminary figures show the paper's circulation, fluctuating between 380,000 and 395,000, is roughly equal to the combined audited circulation of a year ago.

Still, many Union-Tribune employees remain anxious. Despite management claims to the contrary, staffers predict the company will phase out afternoon home delivery in the next year, triggering another round of layoffs. Rumors that Copley planned to sell her empire – which includes a number of small and medium-sized papers in Illinois and the Los Angeles area – to the Chicago Tribune Co. were so strong that on February 28 she issued a memo denying them. But by that time, a new rumor had taken hold: Copley would swap her Illinois holdings to the Tribune chain for the Escondido Times-Advocate, the Union-Tribune's largest daily rival in San Diego County.

"You've combined two papers that had quite different identities, and the resulting product hasn't found its identity yet," Bennett says. "Once you go through an upheaval like this, the foundations are shaken loose and you don't know exactly where the process is going to stop... I really think that in the end we're going to have a great paper." l

Katharine Webster, a former intern on the San Diego Tribune's editorial page and former San Diego Union reporter, is a freelance writer.