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San Diego Union-Tribune – the Copley era and afterwards
Ira and James Copley, Michael and David Copley, the firing of Neil Morgan, the Palestinian owner, the new building
Who is the Union-Tribune's new owner?
- Almost 60 years ago, Tom Joubran immigrated to the United States from the town of Nazareth, once part of Palestine, and began a new life in the suburbs of Flint, Michigan. A Maronite Christian, he fled his home, the Flint Journal would later recount, after being kidnapped and held for several days by marauding Jews, who then traded him and 5 other Arabs for the freedom of 15 Jews.
- By Matt Potter, May 13, 2009
All in the Family
- This story begins in 1951, with a brief liaison between Margaret Helen Kinney and John Hunt. She was a stenographer and he was a clerk at Borden dairy company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Margaret Helen Hunt, who went by her middle name, soon moved to San Diego with her widowed mother. They bought a small house on 54th Street, near University Avenue, and on January 31, 1952, at University Hospital, Helen gave birth to David Hunt.
- By Don McCullough, Sept. 18, 2003
Is U-T’s new downtown HQ jinxed?
- A downtown office building built as the headquarters of fallen San Diego Republican kingpin Gordon Luce is soon to become a venue for what some media watchers anticipate will be the last stand of the San Diego Union-Tribune. The reincarnation of the 600 B Street high-rise, last year said to be set for partial conversion into a hotel, is redolent with the history of the city's collapsed political and financial empires of the past, and the more recent taint of a controversial tenant, whose name at the top of the building is now reportedly to be replaced by the newspaper's….
- By Matt Potter, Nov. 20, 2015
The end of the Neil Morgan era
- Last week's surprise departure of Neil Morgan from the Union-Tribune after 54 years as a Copley scribe was shrouded in about as much confusion and contradiction as many of the columns he authored. A six-page statement written in the third person was handed around Morgan's lawyer's office during a late-afternoon news conference on Wednesday, March 31. It portrayed the columnist as a journalistic gigolo, cast off after decades of service to a mistress whom he had helped raise from poverty to the pinnacle of the city's most powerful institution.
- By Matt Potter, April 8, 2004
End of an era
- There has long been an unspoken but widespread concern about the health of 52-year-old Copley, who back in 2001 took over from his mother Helen as U-T publisher. Some 10 years ago he underwent quadruple bypass surgery, and his three driving-under-the-influence convictions in the past 16 years – the most recent in April 2002 – provided fodder for those who were convinced he was drinking too much for his own good.
- By Matt Potter, Feb. 19, 2004
The Rise and Fall of the Copley Press
- When Ira Clifton Copley of Aurora, Illinois, first saw San Diego on a trip with his ailing brother to the Hotel del Coronado in 1891, it was a dingy town on the southern fringe of California, a quick stopover on runs to the Mexican border, a bordello-filled paradise for Pacific Fleet sailors, a dead end for the railroad, a place of palm trees, whitewashed wood-frame cottages, and a blinding sun.
- By Matt Potter, Feb. 28, 2008