Some Say Paper Has Potential to Be Great Despite Its Mediocre Past

Ira C. Copley had already made one fortune in the utility business, started a second in newspapers and won a seat in Congress by the time he set his sights on San Diego’s newspapers in 1928.

The sugar-rich Spreckels family sold the Midwesterner its morning Union and Evening Tribune -- a transaction Copley celebrated with a dinner at the grand Hotel del Coronado. The Colonel (like other magnates of the era, Copley fancied his old military title) promised the assembled dignitaries that the publications would betray no bias and simply “deliver the goods.”

It was a pledge that would be broken, with consistency, in the decades to follow.

Copley’s San Diego papers became the unofficial organs of the business establishment, the budding military installations around the city and, especially, the Republican Party -- traits it largely shared with another growing newspaper to the north, Harry Chandler’s Los Angeles Times.

That tradition continued when Col. Ira’s adopted son, Jim, took over the newspapers after his father’s death in 1947. Critics complained loudly, for instance, that Sen. John F. Kennedy got paltry coverage in the 1960 presidential campaign, compared to Richard Nixon.

Not until the late 1970s did the Copley papers begin to emerge from decades of favoritism and mediocre journalism that earned it a reputation, in the words of current Editor Karin Winner, as “an ultra-right-wing newspaper in the back pocket of the establishment.”

Today, the Union-Tribune has a relatively stable circulation. It produces good, though rarely great, journalism. And it makes good money in a market it has dominated for years.

The newspaper that resulted from a 1992 merger of the morning and afternoon papers has a weekday circulation of 354,000, down less than 6% in the last three years, and the privately held Copley newspaper chain (including 10 dailies and nine weeklies) reported revenue of $555 million last year, an increase of 8% from 2003.

Many San Diego news veterans miss the days when the two Copley papers operated separately and competed for stories with a daily Los Angeles Times edition, which closed in 1992.

“It’s a lesser paper in part today because it used to have to compete against two other dailies,” said Dean Nelson, director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University. “I get the sense there isn’t as much urgency: ‘If I don’t get around to covering something today, there is always tomorrow.’ ”

Nelson and several other observers of the local journalism scene said they had seen bright spots at the Union-Tribune recently and that other areas still showed room for improvement.

The underfunded city pension system that has shaken City Hall is a prime example. The Union-Tribune should have been quicker and more aggressive in ferreting out the problems, Winner acknowledged in an interview. But Winner said she was “extremely proud” of the paper’s subsequent coverage, which has been led by the dogged reporting of Philip J. LaVelle.The newspaper that once would not lay a glove on Republican sacred cows has gained respect in some quarters because Marcus Stern of Copley’s Washington bureau took on Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s (R-Rancho Santa Fe) apparent conflicts of interest with a defense contractor.

Coverage of the border and immigration issues also has improved markedly over the years, several local journalism analysts said. And readers of the Union-Tribune occasionally get treated to fine storytelling, such as a three-part series by Alex Roth in May on the missing fishing boat Gina Lisa.

Still, the U-T has not always shined brightest in its own backyard. When wildfires devastated the city and much of the state in 2003, for example, the Los Angeles Times and not the Union-Tribune won the Pulitzer Prize. The Los Angeles paper used its much larger staff to craft more analytical stories, including a piece on how San Diego had been inadequately prepared to fight the fires.

Veterans of the Union-Tribune frequently echo a common sentiment in an industry beset by layoffs and shrinking circulation -- that the paper would be much better if it built its staff and took more chances.

James W. Crawley, a 14-year veteran of the paper who left last year and now works for Media General News Service, complained that the paper had not done enough to follow the massive deployment of San Diego-area military personnel to the war in Iraq.

“It could be a great paper,” Crawley said, “if there was some leadership.”