After Soon-Shiong took over the LA Times and U-T in a 2018 deal valued at $600 million or so, the San Diego paper shifted leftward, cheering on the early retirement of GOP Sheriff Bill Gore and the takeover by Democrats of city hall and the county board of supervisors.

Non-Sunny scenario

Could the San Diego Union-Tribune be in play — and headed back into local hands? That’s the wishful thinking of those on both sides of the political aisle, brought on by last week’s sale by Alden Global Capital of the Baltimore Sun to Sinclair Broadcasting’s executive chairman David D. Smith. The hope is that the move might portend a wider divestment of Alden’s sprawling newspaper holdings, which include the U-T, acquired in July of last year from Los Angeles billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong.

After Soon-Shiong took over the LA Times and U-T in a 2018 deal valued at $600 million or so, the San Diego paper shifted leftward, cheering on the early retirement of GOP Sheriff Bill Gore and the takeover by Democrats of city hall and the county board of supervisors. But the long-troubled paper still failed to thrive.

Patrick Soon-Shiong, just one of many recent owners of the U-T

Then last July, Soon-Shiong abruptly jettisoned the U-T to Alden for undisclosed terms, and a raft of staffers were cast off via ostensibly voluntary buyouts. The paper has since settled into mushy, middle-of-the-road politics, while continuing to lose circulation, pages, and advertisers. With Alden’s remote operating style portending an agonizingly slow death for the U-T, a Baltimore scenario, in which a rich local buys the town’s daily from Alden, might seem like an improvement.

But San Diego Republican sugar daddies both wealthy and willing enough to front the expenses of a U-T turnover are in short supply, with ex-owners Helen Copley and son David in their graves, and aging “Papa Doug” Manchester, another ex-U-T proprietor, likely done with the business. On the left, billionaire Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs, once a local Democratic stalwart, shows few signs of political life beyond backing his granddaughter’s low-energy House career. That could leave the U-T’s post-Alden bones to be picked over by so-called non-partisan news operations, including San Diego State University’s KPBS, the Voice of San Diego, and SDSU-based iNewsource, which of late has been hiring ex-U-T staffers, including cartoonist Steve Breen and reporter Greg Moran.

But money for all kinds of San Diego media has been hard to come by. iNewsource’s annual report for the 2023 fiscal year ending in June shows a plunge in “financial assets available to meet cash needs for general expenditures within one year,” from $1,270,207 in 2022 to $391,306 a year later. KPBS has yet to post its public accounting report for 2023, which usually appears online every December.

Meanwhile, Union-Tribune acting letters editor Laura Castañeda, who has been the paper’s deputy editor of editorial & opinion since the Soon-Shiong days, used her X account on January 15 to bemoan the kind of reader feedback the paper has been getting of late. “Very little diversity, folks. Scares me. Where are the GenZ’s, communities of color, students? Really? No one else has opinions on issues that matter to them in this community?”

Phone dropping

A controversial prisoner phone and electronics contractor sued for “sharing privileged conversations,” according to an account by the Albany Times-Union, gave $10,000 on January 11 to the 2026 Lt. Governor campaign of San Diego state Senate Democrat Toni Atkins. (Last week, Atkins switched to the race for governor, for which she can use all the campaign funds collected for her Lt. Governor bid.)

Carrollton, Texas-based Securus Technologies, “provides telephone services to thousands of inmates in New York’s prison system — and also at more than a dozen county jails across the state,” says the Nov 9, 2023 Times-Union dispatch. Securus, which “has a $70 million contract with New York’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to provide telephone and texting services to thousands of inmates in state prisons,” per the story, “has defended its monitoring practices and the telephone technology that state prison officials said is providing inmates and their families with some of the lowest caller rates in the country.

Toni Atkins’ donor conducted a different kind of listening session.

The company’s software records phone conversations and uses artificial intelligence to monitor and transcribe them. Suspicious words and phrases within conversations are flagged by the technology, further analyzed, and then forwarded to jail and prison administrators for review, according to law enforcement officials.”

The story adds that Securus “settled a case in Kansas after 500 people were identified as having their privileged calls recorded in a private prison. The technology company and CoreCivic, the private operator of the prison, agreed to pay a $3.7 million settlement in 2020, after paying $1.6 million to the same affected incarcerated individuals in 2019.” In addition, “Securus Technologies also promoted a product that tracked the locations of cellphones at the beginning and end of calls made to prisons and jails, according to company documents from 2018. The geo-locating of non-incarcerated people with the Location Based Services product faced scrutiny from prison reform advocates, who believe that the technology violated civil liberties. Securus Technologies stopped offering the product five years ago and ‘will never offer it again under any circumstance,’ the company said.”

A June 2020 account by Vice.com highlighted the company’s move into the burgeoning field of immigration detention services during the Trump administration. “Documents obtained from federal agencies and through public records requests show that Securus has been operating in facilities where immigrants are held since at least 2008, and has provided telecom and surveillance services to no fewer than 13 facilities that hold ICE detainees in 11 states, most of which are county jails where immigrants make up a minority portion of the overall incarcerated population. As of January 2020, Securus had active contracts with at least nine county jails where immigrants were being held.”

In recent years, the Atkins donor has promoted the use of tablet computers by inmates. “The two biggest players in the industry, Securus and Viapath, have recently attempted to re-brand themselves as education providers, pointing to educational content on their devices,” recounts a September 28, 2023 Slate.com piece. “Securus, for example, said it has partnered with seven state corrections departments to offer classes through a dozen colleges. Since 2015, more than 1600 incarcerated students have earned degrees using Lantern, Securus’ learning management system. The vast majority of users, however, say that they use tablets primarily for entertainment and communication. And even for those who have access to more comprehensive content, buggy apps, tech glitches, and unresponsive customer service often get in the way.”

— Matt Potter

(@sdmattpotter)

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