PRESS WATCH : Afternoon Death

Southern California will lose an important journalistic voice in January when the San Diego Tribune, the afternoon paper in the state’s second-largest city, merges with the morning San Diego Union.

Both papers are published by the same company, share business operations and report to the same publisher, Helen K. Copley. To many San Diegans they are one and the same.

But in fact, the papers have maintained separate and fiercely competitive news staffs, a costly endeavor at a time when many afternoon newspapers around the country have long ago died.

Perhaps the most notable differences between the two papers show up on the editorial pages.

Although both conservative, they frequently have had different tones and sometimes feistily contradictory views on national, state and local issues.

For instance, the Tribune supported the Proposition 99 tobacco tax and Proposition 126, the alcohol tax; the Union opposed them. The Tribune opposes the “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative, while the Union has supported it.

The Tribune took on the plight of undocumented immigrants in a fervent five-year series of editorials that helped persuade Congress to enact the 1986 amnesty law and won the paper a Pulitzer Prize.

The city, the region and the country have benefited from such diversity of opinion, and Copley deserves credit for allowing it in what is traditionally considered the publisher’s forum.

San Diego and the state will be diminished by the loss of that voice.