Sacramento Union

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Logo used for many decades by the daily

The Sacramento Union was a newspaper founded in 1851 in Sacramento, California. It was the oldest daily newspaper west of the Mississippi before it closed its doors after 143 years in January 1994, no longer able to compete with The Sacramento Bee, which was founded just six years after the Union, in 1857. The archives of the Union are in the Special Collections of the Shields Library of UC Davis.

Writer and journalist Mark Twain dispatched a series of articles on Hawaii for The Union in 1866. These were very popular, and many historians credit the series with turning Twain into a journalistic star. Because many people thought that Twain wrote in The Union's building, whenever The Union was struggling financially during the turn of the century, the owners would drag out an old desk and sell it for a princely sum as "the desk where Mark Twain sat." A huge bust of Twain sat in The Union's lobby for nearly three decades before the paper folded.

The Union was owned by Copley Newspapers in the 1960s. During those years, it was the dominant, morning newspaper in Sacramento. Then, in the mid-1970s, The Bee decided to go head-to-head with The Union as a morning newspaper, and promised that The Bee would arrive on the doorstep by 6 a.m. The Union's circulation department couldn't equal that service, and The Bee quickly became the larger of the two dailies.

While The Bee had a much larger staff, The Union beat The Bee on a number of huge stories. Among them were the Dorothea Puente Victorian gravesites and the investigative reporting that led to the resignation of Chief of Education Bill Honig.

Conservative financier Richard Mellon Scaife owned the newspaper from 1977 to 1989. While there were reports that Scaife lost millions of dollars every year on the newspaper, he enjoyed having a conservative voice in the capital of the largest state in The Union.

In the late 1980s, the newspaper changed from the standard broadsheet size to a tabloid, and The Union launched a marketing campaign called "Grab the Tab." For the most part, it was a failure and the paper suffered losses in circulation.

In 1989, Scaife sold the Union to local real estate developers Daniel Benvenuti Jr. and David Kassis. They hired Joseph Farah as editor, and the paper went into a more conservative direction. According to a former reporter, Farah issued memos prohibiting reporters from using the words "gay," assault rifles," and "women's health center"; these were replaced by "homosexual," semi-automatic rifles," and "abortion clinics."[1] Farah resigned as editor 15 months later; under his editorship, the paper's circulation declined nearly 30 percent, from 72,000 to 52,000. [2] Farah later founded the website WorldNetDaily.

Benvenuti and Kassis sold the newspaper's press -- which was state-of-the-art in the mid-1960s, creating the best color of newspapers throughout the nation -- in 1991 to a Mexican town. They began to have the paper printed at Herald Printing. Herald's president Ralph Danel Jr. acquired the Union from Benvenuti and Kassis in November 1992. The selling price was in large part the debt that Benvenuti and Kassis owed Herald for its printing services. In an attempt to reduce losses, circulation was dropped outside of the Sacramento metro area and, two months before its closure, publication was changed from seven days a week to three days a week. The Union published its final edition on January 14, 1994. The cover featured a color photo of the paper's last staff under the blaring headline, "We're History," coined by the newspaper's last editor, Ken Harvey.

In late 2004, a modernized Sacramento Union returned with bimonthly magazines, then started publishing monthly in May 2005. James H. Smith, a former publisher of the Sacramento Union newspaper and co-founder of the Western Journalism Center with Farah, served as publisher, and Kenneth E. Grubbs Jr., former director of the National Journalism Center, served as editor.[3] The publishers did not intend to return as a print daily newspaper, concentrating instead on web and magazine publishing. The magazine folded after only a few issues, though the Sacramento Union continues to publish solely on the web. Much of the office staff was laid off in May 2005.[4] Smith and Grubbs were ousted in June 2005, and J.J. McClatchy, a member of the Union's board of directors, was named general manager. Smith accused McClatchy of staging a hostile takeover of the Union on behalf of his family, which owns The Sacramento Bee.[5]

In the autumn of 2005, demolition crews started work on the old Union office building, located at 301 Capitol Mall in downtown Sacramento. The building was constructed in 1967. (Earth Metrics Inc., 1989.) A 53-story high-rise called "The Towers on Capitol Mall" is planned for the Unions previous spot, but by 2007, the developer was struggling to finance the project. If built, it will consist of two separate mixed-use buildings that feature luxury apartment and hotel suites. [6]

A tabloid print edition of The Sacramento Union appeared on Friday, July 21, 2006, sporting a similar masthead, with the notation "Since 1851". A look at the bottom of page two reveals this is Volume 1, Number 1t. J.C. Dutra is th'e Publisher and Editor-In-Chief. The positions of Editor, Metro Editor, Sports Editor and Sales Director are listed as "Vacant". There are a grand total of three advertisements in the 32-page tabloid issue, which is available free at newsstands, and by subscription. [7] Much of the content of this issue comes from the Associated Press, but there are a few original articles. It appears a resurrection of the paper is under way.

[edit] References

Environmental Site Assessment for the Sacramento Union Building, 301 Capitol Building, Sacramento, Ca., Earth Metrics Inc., November 22, 1989
Elisabeth Sherwin (2000). The Sacramento Union rests in peace at Shields. Retrieved January 25, 2006.
Salamon, Kathleen. Seceding from the Union: Kathleen Salamon's explanation of why she left the "Sacramento Union." (Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 1991)
Farah, Joseph. Why the Liberal Press Is Out to Get Us." (Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 1991). A rebuttal of Salamon's article.
"Sacramento Union shifts from six to three days a week," Editor & Publisher, October 30, 1993.
"Union's New Owner Plans to Turn Newspaper Around," The Business Journal-Sacramento, November 9, 1992.
"One of West's Oldest Newspapers Shutting Down," Associated Press, January 12, 1994.