Afternoon Readers Feel Deprived

Each afternoon, Monday through Saturday, Phillip Gay had his routine. The sociology professor at San Diego State University went to his driveway and reached down for a copy of the Tribune, San Diego’s p.m. newspaper.

Gay called it one of life’s little pleasures. He especially liked the Tribune sports section--the “open, witty voice” of writers Nick Canepa and Barry Bloom, and editorials “that seemed to look out for the common man . . . the little guy.”

Wednesday morning, Gay, like many San Diegans, was astounded to hear that, next year, the San Diego Union and the San Diego Tribune will become one paper, ending the Tribune’s reign as an afternoon daily founded in the 19th Century.

The consolidated Union-Tribune, with morning and afternoon editions, will begin publication early next year, but, to Gay, it will never be the same.

“I liked their sports section better than any I’ve ever read,” he said.

“Each Tribune sportswriter comes across with a style, a voice all his own,” Gay added. “Too many sportswriters sound the same, and, unlike the Tribune’s, too many want to be cheerleaders or apologists for the team owners.”

Gay said the demise of the Tribune was a setback for blue-collar San Diegans, who, because of their earlier work shifts, tend to get to the paper later in the day.

He said the decline of p.m. newspapers “bodes ill for America. Ideally, you’d have 10 different papers with 10 different points of view, and we’re losing that. My wife said it was ridiculous to take two newspapers, but I would have done it for the next 50 years, just to get the Tribune.”

Readers said they will wait and see how they like the new combined paper.

Ron Brumshagen, owner of a Hillcrest plant shop called the Basket Case, said he liked the Tribune for “never condescending” to the working man--like him.

“The Tribune has always been down to earth, and compared to the Trib, the Union looks superficial,” Brumshagen said. “I liked (political writer and former congressman) Lionel Van Deerlin. I’ll miss him.

“Like a lot of San Diegans, I’m just a lonely guy who liked to go home after a hard day’s work and read the Trib.

“What can I say? They had writers who seemed to talk to the reader, as though you were meeting them on a street corner. I liked that. I’ll miss that. Few newspapers do that any more, and they ought to do it more.”

Like many readers, Brumshagen credited the Tribune sports section with being the best in the city.

“It was spicy, hard-hitting,” he said. “Barry Bloom (the San Diego Padres beat writer) was one I liked specifically. He had the unusual nerve to attack the prima donnas in sports and was never in the back pocket of the team owner, like a lot of sportswriters are.”

Margaret Cervenka, a San Carlos housewife, said that, as a longtime Tribune subscriber, she was not attached to any individual writer or to the paper’s more populist viewpoints. She and her husband simply liked having an afternoon paper.

“It won’t affect my life that much,” Cervenka said. “We don’t get attached to newspapers. But we read our newspaper in the evening, and we always have. So, yes, we will miss that.”

Glen Broom, chairman of the journalism department at SDSU, said, “Any time a city loses an individual newspaper, it’s a great loss. So this city is now poor by one newspaper, and unfortunately, that’s a trend across the country.”

“I liked the style, the short, to-the-point stories in the Tribune,” Broom said. “I liked the writing, the columnists. . . .But it wasn’t the paper I liked so much, it was the fact that it was an afternoon newspaper. And now there will be one less afternoon paper than there was before, and that’s too bad. It’s really too bad.”