For Newspaper Junkies, Rancho Bernardo Is Heaven : Plethora of Local and Nearby Publications Have Affluent Community Covered

Thursday is newspaper day in Rancho Bernardo. There are papers on the lawns. There are papers in the mailboxes. There are papers stacked in the supermarkets and in the discretely screened rows of newspaper racks along the busier thoroughfares of this affluent San Diego community.

Cause of the Thursday paper plethora is four hometown publications--two weeklies, one biweekly newspaper and a monthly magazine--all competing for existence with each other and with the half-dozen dailies from near and far that cater to this inland isle of tile roofs and tailored greenbelts.

Eileen Haag, publisher of the Bernardo News, says the competition for advertising, not readers, is fierce. All four local periodicals distribute free copies to Rancho Bernardo residents.

No News Too Small

The veteran News, which she and partner Barbara Warden started in 1971, is the cream of the local crop, Haag said, because it assures its advertisers of Rancho Bernardo readership by printing every squib of local news and social happenings. On Thursday, 60 young paper carriers paid by the News hop on their bikes or skateboards and blanket the area’s 14,000-plus homes, apartments and condos.

“People want to know every little thing about what’s going on here,” Haag said. “They are very aware . If there is a traffic accident, people call in and ask me who was hurt and how seriously.”

Traffic accidents are the one glitch in the News’ blanket coverage of Rancho Bernardo. For non-fatal fender benders, Haag must rely for the facts mainly on her readers because Rancho Bernardo is no longer a one-cop town and the routine traffic reports are sent down to the San Diego Police Department files 25 miles south and lost in the bureaucratic maw.

It was different in the early days of the News, Haag reminisced.

“Back then, the policeman on duty would drop in at the office for a cup of coffee every so often and fill me in on the news,” she explained. “Now, they can’t do that because they say if they did it for us, they would have to do it for all the other newspapers.”

Four full-time news staffers and state-of-the-art computers allow the Bernardo News to out-produce the other local weekly, Rancho Bernardo Journal, but the Journal has a big brother, the Poway Chieftain, to bolster its local coverage. The Journal has loyal subscribers who receive their weekly by mail; then, everyone else in town gets a free copy later, via carrier.

Outsiders have the mistaken idea that Rancho Bernardo is another Golden Age Village, full of rich, retired and over-the-hill residents interested in bridge clubs and golf matches and little else, said Patti Heissenberger, 25-year-old editor and editorial staff of the Rancho Bernardo Journal. Actually, only about 18% of the community’s residents are seniors, and that percentage is dwindling as young professional couples, established families and upwardly mobile singles move in, she said.

To Heissenberger, the newspaper is a career beginning and Rancho Bernardo a perfect place to start. Rancho Bernardo residents take themselves and their community very seriously, which makes local news-gathering both easy and rewarding.

For example, Heissenberger turned her writing talents this week toward an attractive nuisance that has been ignored by city regulators for years--a V-shaped drainage ditch near an elementary school that attracts skateboarders, as well as younger fry hunting for tadpoles.

She wrote of the present concerns of the parents, of the past rescue incidents and of the city utilities department’s valid reasons for not fencing off the ditch. Her article, on a subject not considered “newsworthy” by larger dailies, succeeded.

The ditch will be cleaned of glass and debris that had caused a blockage and deep-water drainage backup. Also, San Diego city officials are alerted to the potential political and financial liability that the concrete ditch poses.

For the Rancho Bernardo Sun, it’s the brighter side of the community’s life that earns the ink.

“We are a social newspaper, a pictorial review of the community,” explained Sun publisher-editor-owner Jorge Garza. If a San Ysidro-style massacre occurred at a Rancho Bernardo eatery, Sun readers would not be appraised of it because “we stay away from bad news and controversial issues,” he said.

With the help of his wife, Renee, and Christine Busch, “the fastest finger in the West,” Garza delivers a hefty chunk of good news and upcoming events in camera-ready order to the printer every two weeks. On every other Thursday, 15,700 copies of the Sun go out by mail to every household and business in Rancho Bernardo, northern Poway and southern Escondido.

Garson said the biweekly has provided a comfortable living during its more than three-year life. It “will never make me a millionaire, but we’re having a lot of fun.”

The Sun’s major competitor, in Garson’s view, is Rancho Magazine. It is a thick tabloid publication, a combination of monthly magazine and hometown events calendar for the Interstate 15 corridor of inland communities of Escondido, Rancho Bernardo, Rancho Penasquitos and Poway.

Rancho Magazine’s 32,000 copies go by mail to “selected” households in its circulation area--based on housing values and catering to the affluent, and into rooms in area hotels and motels.

According to editor-publisher Ann Jolley, Rancho Magazine has no equal in telling residents and visitors what to do, where to eat and what’s coming up in the North County’s inland metropolis.

The four Rancho Bernardo-based publications are all within walking distance of each other, located in shopping centers and office complexes that honeycomb both sides of Bernardo Center Road. They range from the modest second-floor office of the Sun in a shopping center to the spacious suite of the News, purchased in 1983 in a bank building complex.

Sharing the lush Rancho Bernardo consumer market and vying for advertising with the locals are the Escondido Times-Advocate, which prints a South Zone edition for 6,820 paid subscribers in Rancho Bernardo, Rancho Penasquitos and Poway; and the San Diego Union and The Tribune, Copley newspapers that have a combined paid circulation of 5,848 in Rancho Bernardo--63.5% of the households.

Also sharing Rancho Bernardo readers’ fancy are USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor and Los Angeles Herald Examiner, selling well on newsstands and by subscription and prompting concern over eyestrain for the average Rancho Bernardo resident.