San Diego Union-Tribune — the Copley era

Helen and David Copley, Eileen Jackson, Neil Morgan and Walter Cronkite, Mayor O’Connor’s slumming in Balboa Park

Author

By Various Authors

Publish Date

Aug. 19, 2017

The Last Rewrite

That night I spoke to winos and street types who talked about murder, to councilmen and cops who spoke of shooting “to incapacitate,” and to people at the Knickerbocker Hotel who knew Brown. The main story had already been written by Preston Turegano, and I did two others: one of them a profile of Brown. I left the newsroom at 2:00 a.m. What appeared in the Tribune nine hours later was not essentially what I had written.

By Bob Dorn, Sept. 27, 1979 | Read full article

Foxhill

Slow Fall from Fox Hill

“I thought I would see my father a lot, but I didn’t. My father then married Helen (Helen Hunt). She was his former secretary, and she had her own son, David. From 1966, when he married Helen, until 1970, I hardly ever saw my father. Even when he came East on business, he wouldn’t call me at school because she wouldn’t like that. She had her own son and my father adopted him after the wedding.”

By Eleanor Widmer, July 6, 1978 | Read full article

Everybody Who’s Anybody

“The police called me one morning and said, ‘We believe someone is using your column to plan burglaries. Sixty people have been robbed.’” The San Diego Museum of Man was giving a Halloween party. The police asked Mrs. Jackson to announce the party in her column, together with a list of names of people who planned to attend. The police arranged to have a policeman in the house of each person named.

By Judith Moore, June 30, 1988 | Read full article

Beneath the headline “It’s as hot here as the desert,” is a large, full-color photo of tomboyishly-clad O’Connor and DaRosa parading past a half-naked, black homeless.

A Summer Night’s Fever Dream

DaRosa is telling us that our Queen Mayor, our Siddhartha/Cinderella, is searching. Her implied disenchantment with orthodox Catholicism has brought her to taboo’s door, a lurid pagan land lies beyond its threshold. It is this tension that has fueled DaRosa’s literary dynamics. It is this conflict that has orchestrated O’Connor’s every move. The deconstructed text is an easy read. Maureen’s foray into poverty was a vehicle for personal exorcism. Her demon: the male power elite.

By Arturo Cardenas-Ruiz, Sept. 15, 1988 | Read full article

Careful lest the public forget how very close they are, Morgan has chronicled his Master’s every move, thought, and desire. They have even sailed together, as Morgan ofttimes has reminded us.

I’m Morgan, He’s Cronkite

Scholars, particularly Vjaceslav Vsevolodovic Ivanov, director of the Section on Structural Typology of the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Walter Leland Cronkite Studies at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, have suggested that Morgan’s outlandish aggrandizement of Cronkite is little more than an attempt to convince his readership that he (Morgan) is indeed an influential-newspaper-editor-with-well-connected-friends-in-high-places. [Morgan’s Tribune column] reflects nothing more than a woefully misplaced sense of self-importance,” states Ivanov.

By Abe Opincar, Dec. 22, 1988 | Read full article

Despite the festering labor dispute, the Union and Tribune continue to prosper financially. (Joe Klein)

The Copley Press Used to be Considered a Friendly Employer

As the discussion heated up around midnight, a former Tribune reporter who had been promoted to assistant managing editor slipped away from the party. Later that morning, he was due at the U-T plant in Mission Valley to help the company put out a test version of the newspaper, without the services of union members. The U-T was prepared to publish without them. “They’re running a scab paper tonight,” one of the other guests noted quietly.

By Matt Potter, March 22, 1990 | Read full article

Neil Morgan announced that the marketing consultant had recommended that the Tribune be converted into a morning tabloid.

Red Sky at Morning, Morgan Take Warning

Urban has reportedly argued that readers under 35 require advice columns and youth-oriented investigative reporting. But Tribune staffers complain that Urban's vague suggestions are difficult to define, much less implement. They worry that Morgan, with his old-fashioned, boosterish approach to newspapering, is being set up for a fall and may take the Tribune with him. "The morning tabloid idea doesn't make any sense at all. Why would they want to compete with themselves in the morning?"

By Matt Potter, May 2, 1991 | Read full article

Helen Copley. In an odd twist of fate, Helen married her boss, Jim Copley, and David Hunt became David Copley, who would grow up to be president of the Copley newspaper chain.

A Son by any Other Name

In January 1977, an unusual bill began a swift course through the Iowa legislature. It was intended to correct an odd quirk of state law that made it illegal to obtain an Iowa divorce in any county other than the one in which both parties had lived. “As I recall, this thing just sailed right through,” recalls Walter Conlon, an Iowa attorney who was then a freshman legislator. “But I swear to you, I never heard of Helen Copley.”

By Matt Potter, June 20, 1991 | Read full article