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- The Sacramento Union daily newspaper 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 birth of this storied newspaper institution began 156 years ago, when the city of Sacramento was in its infancy. Under the direction of its first editor Dr. John F. Morse, who had attracted proprietors through letters to the New Orleans Delta and well-known literary attainments, The Union was initially printed as The Daily Union on Wednesday, March 19, 1851. Upon the front page of this 23-inch by 34-inch paper, Morse addressed the readers of The Union, committing to “publish the first news in the best style and at the lowest prices” and “to have an efficient correspondent in every important town and mining region in the state. ” The existence of the paper had evolved through the efforts of four Sacramento Transcript printers. The printers had introduced the idea of The Union’s creation a year earlier, due to their frustrations with a labor dispute between the Transcript and the Placer Times, which were the city’s first two newspapers. The battle between these two newspapers became so fierce that the papers sold advertising space for below the cost of composition for the mere purpose of undercutting their competition. Opening its operation at its 21 J St. headquarters, The Union endured very competitive times during its early years, which found it as one of about 60 Sacramento newspapers. Sacramento’s status as a newspaper town, however, was short lived, as all but two newspapers failed, leading to The Union’s famous slogan, “The Oldest Daily in the West. ” In addition to this fact, The Union’s early years are also recognized for their famous contributors, who included Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Dan De Quille. The Union is also noted for covering many world-famous events with details about the Gold Rush, the Civil War, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, World Wars I and II, Charles Lindberg’s flights across the Atlantic, the Vietnam War, the Apollo 11 moon landing, the Iranian hostage crisis and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The emergence of The Daily Union as a leading newspaper evolved quite quickly, as its initial circulation of 500 was soon afterward expanded with an even wider circulation and the daily publication was joined by the semi-monthly Steamer Union (1851) for Atlantic states and European readers, the Weekly Union (1852), and the semi-annual Pictorial Union (1853), which featured drawings of towns, landscapes and other scenes of the era. The Union, which was often referred to as the “Miners’ Bible” during its early years, passed a major test when it overcame a great fire on Nov. 2, 1852 and continued printing on a small press that was saved from the flames. A brick building, which still stands today, was later constructed at 121 J Street to replace the paper’s original building. On Nov. 17, 1858, The Union became the first California newspaper to issue a double-sheet daily. The publication was also recognized as the largest double-sheet daily in the nation. The Sacramento Publishing Co. purchased the Sacramento Daily Union, as it was then known, and the Daily Record in 1875 and merged them into one newspaper, calling it the Sacramento Daily Record-Union – a name that was later dropped. As a well-respected publication and a fixture of the city, The Union remained financially successful, as it continued providing news decade after decade. But with the passing of the Eighties, which saw the newspaper selling about 105,000 papers daily, The Union’s circulation had declined to about half this figure. In about two decades, the paper had fallen from the heights of its 1966 purchase by Copley Newspapers, which brought in millions of dollars that resulted in improvements such as the 1967 construction of the publication’s Capitol Mall headquarters and a new long-run, photo-offset press. 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 6:00 a.m. The Union 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 grave sites and the investigative reporting that led to the resignation of California Department of Education Superintendent 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 veered even further to the right. 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. " Farah resigned as editor 15 months later; under his editorship, the paper's circulation declined nearly 30 percent, from 72,000 to 52,000. 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 formerly daily Union published its final edition on Friday, 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.
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