"Printed first edition of SD U-T in LA...". Which is great for fans of the local baseball team in San Diego, hoping any Padres game played at Petco Park ends before 10:15pm so there would be a chance that the boxscore might show up in the sports section the next day.

So when will the staff move out of the building?

Gosh, dwbat, you beat me to it. I was wondering if exiting the San Diego production facility of the U-T Mission Valley meant everybody or just printers. When will the staff move out and where will they go? It seems to me that relocation is a pretty big deal in its own right.

As someone who has dunned the San Diego Union-Tribune leadership for decades for its suppression of hard data and objective analysis of population-environment connections, I find this advertisement courageous and greatly refreshing. If they get the right person, the UT could become a national leader in expanding understanding of the the environmental degradation that will result from continued US population growth:

<< The corporation’s website features a help-wanted advertisement for a new U-T senior “environment” reporter. “Do you take on explanatory reporting and watchdog assignments with equal gusto?” the notice asks. “Are you someone who aggressively pursues enterprise stories with a national or even international imprint? Does your definition of environment reporting cover everything from California’s drought and land-use controversies to population control and marine science?”>>

Surely the UT leadership is aware that in even using the phrase “population control” they are likely to be attacked by right wing whackos as “commies” and by left wing whackos as “racists.” Kudos to the newly enlarged UT cojones!

As journalism prof Michael Maher pointed out in his 1997 article, “How and why journalists avoid the population environment connection” (see http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02208512#page-1 OR http://dieoff.org/page118.htm), a great defect of environmental journalism in the US (and most other western nations) is that news stories about environmental problems due in large measure to population growth almost NEVER mention the connection to population growth, let alone the fact that population growth is driven primarily by high immigration rates.

Most media outlets deliberately act to keep the electorate minimally informed on such issues. This is because most of them are lap dogs to the powerful but delusional neoliberal cornucopian economists who dominate the leadership of both the Democratic and Republican parties and whose religion is Growth Forever, both economic and populational, the environment be damned.

I am not sure that the UT can survive as long as San Diego is treated as the bastard child of LA. One would think that with the qualifications stated in their ad the job would pay well. I wonder what it does pay?

The new ownership did move with great and unseemly haste to shut down the U-T printing plant in Mission Valley and shift the work to the LA area. There was plenty of reason to think that the plant, dating from 1973, was not only obsolete but worn out. That implies, of course, that Copley didn't make improvements during the years that the paper was worth a fortune. (New presses would have been a very costly proposition.) Then again, when circulation had topped out and was dropping, would it have made any sense to modernize the press room?

So, where will the editorial staff of the paper move? Dougie wants his building to have and to hold and do with as he pleases. The paper is probably a good tenant of the part it still occupies, but he has grander things in mind--maybe even demolition and a rebuild.