County newspaper history goes way back

The first newspaper was the San Mateo County Gazette, which made its debut in Redwood City on April 9, 1859. It was a five-column, four-page weekly that shared its offices with a library. Readers could subscribe for four dollars a year. The Gazette was filled with public notices, reprints from other papers and one or two columns of local news, editorials and gossip. Copies of the paper are housed at the history room of Redwood City’s main library on Middlefield Road. So are bound editions of the Redwood City Tribune, born as a weekly in 1923, but in two years grew to become a daily.

The first daily in San Mateo County was the San Mateo News-Leader which came out in 1914. The publication could trace its lineage to 1889 when it was simply called the Leader, a weekly founded by Charles Kirkbride and Richard Jury, both of whom had worked for the Gazette. The rival San Mateo Times started out as a weekly in 1901, quickly growing in circulation until it merged with the News-Leader in 1926 to become a powerful daily.

By 1940, San Mateo County had 12 newspapers, including nine weeklies. The three dailies were the San Mateo Times, the Burlingame Advance-Star and the Redwood City Tribune. The most influential was the Times, which had a circulation that was twice that of the Tribune, according to “From Frontier to Suburb,” a history of San Mateo County and the Peninsula by Alan Hynding. “All of San Mateo County’s pioneering newspapers were town-building journals, attuned in a special way to the heartbeat of local life,” Hynding said. Eventually, he noted, some publications “succumbed to mergers which took some control out of local hands and placed it under out-of-town corporations more concerned with profits than local affairs.”

Hynding was not specific, but the Peninsula Times-Tribune, which was on the scene from 1979 to 1993, was a merger of the Palo Alto Times and the Redwood City Tribune. The paper was run by the Chicago-based Tribune Newspaper conglomerate, owners of the Chicago Tribune. More than one wit said the “merger was more like the merger of the cat and the canary.” In 1996, the San Mateo Times was sold to the Alameda Newspaper Group and renamed the San Mateo County Times. Before it ceased to exist on April 5, 2016, the County Times was identical to the San Jose Mercury News for three years prior.

Flipping through copies of the defunct newspapers, one can only be impressed by the amount of local news contained in each edition, everything from church services to city council meetings. Reporters had very specific “beats,” meaning they were expected to cover particular areas, say schools or police. Editorial staffs numbered in the double figures, which brought to mind the song “I Cover the Waterfront,” the jazz classic inspired by a 1930s book about a reporter whose beat was the docks. A decade ago, I went to the County Government Building in Redwood City to take a photo of the press room for a memoir I was working on. The “press room” sign was up but the area is now occupied by county staff.

The Rear View Mirror by history columnist Jim Clifford appears in the Daily Journal every other Monday. Objects in The Mirror are closer than they appear.