Sacramento Paper to Close : Media: Ailing economy and inability to find financial rescuers are cited in the demise of the 142-year-old Union.

The struggling Sacramento Union, born as a scrappy daily newspaper in the Gold Rush and once a powerful voice in the affairs of California, said Wednesday it will cease publishing on Friday for economic reasons.

The death of the newspaper, which briefly employed Mark Twain as a reporter and until recently called itself the “oldest daily in the West,” leaves the much bigger Sacramento Bee as the state capital’s only daily paper.

“It is with great regret that we say we are unable to save the newspaper and turn it around,” said Ralph Danel Jr., whose family bought the Union two years ago.

Danel blamed the failure on deteriorating economic conditions in the deep California recession and the inability to find a buyer or investors willing to rescue the 142-year-old newspaper.

For at least 25 years, the Union had battled for survival in an advertising market dominated by television and the Bee. It severely reduced its staff, sold its printing presses and for a time embraced pro-American, anti-abortion and pro-business themes that were supposed to attract more readership.

In desperation, the Union in October switched from daily publication to three times a week.

Editor Ken Harvey, a 27-year veteran of the paper, said the demise of the Union will mean the loss of an “independent voice that always tried to speak up for taxpayers” and against bigger government programs, waste and corruption.

Tom Goldstein, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, lamented the loss of yet another newspaper. “Certainly, the Union was not in its most glorious period recently,” Goldstein said, “but any kind of competition is preferable to less competition.”

Circulation of the Union is believed to have fallen below 30,000, far below its peak of about 123,000 in the late 1970s, and its editorial staff totaled only 20 people. By contrast, the Bee’s audited circulation in September totaled 269,665 daily and 337,982 on Sunday.

While in recent years the Union reflected only a shadow of its earlier self, it long was regarded as a substantial influence in the economic, political and social development of California.

The paper started publishing as a four-page daily in 1851, three years after the discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills, and fought for the rights of working miners. Until several months ago, it billed itself as the oldest daily in the West, a distinction disputed by the Oregonian in Portland.

In 1866, the Union hired a young adventurer who used the name Mark Twain as a reporter to write a series of letters on his travels to distant Hawaii.

During the same period, the newspaper was a hearty advocate of construction of the transcontinental railroad that was to link California with the East.

The Union went through many ownership changes, but put up its stiffest challenge to the Bee in the mid-1960s when it was bought by Copley Newspapers Inc.

Copley poured vast sums into the Union, hiring platoons of reporters, editors and advertising sales people and investing heavily in a new building and state-of-the-art color printing equipment. Circulation almost doubled to about 90,000.

The Copley organization sold the Union in 1974.