Scrappy San Diego Tribune Bids Farewell After a 96-Year Run : Newspapers: Afternoon daily will merge with sister publication, the Union.

The San Diego Tribune passed quietly into history Saturday, its readers reluctantly paying their last respects at newsstands throughout the city that the afternoon daily had served for 96 years.

More resigned than mournful at the death of another newspaper, readers and souvenir hunters bought final copies of the Trib and its more well-to-do sister, the Union, both of which appeared for the last time as separate publications Saturday. The two will merge into the San Diego Union-Tribune, a morning daily, today.

“It seems kind of sad,” Jessie LaConte said. “It’s been around for so long and now it’s dying. Times are changing.”

The scrappy Tribune succumbed to the same diseases that have claimed at least 35 other newspapers over the last two years: the powerful influence of television and changing readership habits that have frustrated publishers’ efforts to attract and retain readers without the time to devote to an evening publication.

The merger cost 144 editorial staffers at both newspapers their jobs, 34 of them through layoffs, and silenced the more progressive and iconoclastic of the Copley Press’ two editorial voices here.

“It’s a loss,” said Preston Turegano, who worked for the Tribune the past 21 years. “It’s as great a loss as when you graduate from high school (or) you leave college--maybe a divorce, or when your children grow up and get married.”

Turegano will work as an entertainment reporter for the merged paper.

On Saturday, Tribune staffers and their families watched the Tribune’s final press run at the two newspapers’ Mission Valley headquarters, snapping photographs of each other as a few staffers put out the final issue.

“We’re History!” read the banner headline on the final edition, which was printed on green newsprint and featured a huge photo of the staff waving farewell.

And below that, in smaller type: “But we’ll see you tomorrow.”