Santa Monica Daily Press makes debut today
By Daily Press Staff
Santa Monica has been without a daily newspaper for nearly four years.
Until today. The copy of the Santa Monica Daily Press you’re holding in your hands is our debut edition. With only eight pages, we know it’s not much — yet.
But it will keep coming at you, hopefully for years to come.
We call it a “micro daily,” meaning it’s tabloid-sized, local and free.
It’s this last thing — the “free” bit that sets us apart from most dailies in the country. We are one of a small number of micro dailies that have begun publishing in the U.S. during the last 20 years.
We will apply this “micro” approach to covering Santa Monica, too.
Hard, local news and sports will be our focus, supplemented by state, national and international coverage from the Associated Press.
It takes a reader only a few minutes of reading the letters in any local media to understand Santa Monica’s belief that it is unique — as a debating community, as a vital place to live, vacation, work and — yes, eat and go out. It is also a business center, with all the business issues and controversies that surround it.
When the Santa Monica Outlook published its final edition March 14, 1998, dozens of citizens and policy makers publicly lamented the loss of a daily newspaper. The failure of the Outlook seemed an embarrassment to Santa Monica, but in reality it was more of an embarrassment for Copley, the corporation that bought it and folded much of its operations into the Daily Breeze in Torrance.
We don’t believe that Santa Monica can’t support its own daily.
And that’s why you’re reading this newspaper today.
Traditional paid dailies have been unable to successfully start in the U.S. since World War II, with some corporate or one-town-over exceptions. That’s largely due to the growth of radio and television, which is free to consumers.
The founders of this paper, Dave Danforth, Ross Furukawa, and Carolyn Sackariason, have worked together before at the Aspen Daily News, a paper Danforth founded as a college dropout in 1978. In the ensuing years, Danforth, wondering whether the “micro daily” model was just an accident in a resort town or something worth pursuing, helped found other daily papers in Conway, New Hampshire and Berlin, New Hampshire (Daily Sun), and in the Bay Area communities of Palo Alto (Daily News), Berkeley (Daily Planet), and San Mateo (Daily Journal). They are still here.
We may eventually flop one day, but not in Santa Monica.
Sackariason, the editor, and Danforth are both journalists by background. Sackariason, from Minneapolis, worked most recently as publisher of the Snowmass Sun, a small weekly near Aspen.
Furukawa, the publisher of the Daily Press, is a native of San Diego and an entrepreneur who has taken part in ventures from water purification to business enterprise software.
Danforth is a New Englander with a background in both broadcast and print journalism. We haven’t figured out how to title him, but at one of his other papers, he’s listed as “staff mascot.” You can recognize him easily, still wedded to his Red Sox hat.
We will not be the only source of local news for Santa Monicans. There are four weekly papers here, and two of them — the Mirror and Observer — are home grown, both rising out of the ashes of the fallen Outlook. Two other news authorities, the Lookout and Ocean Park Gazette, appear on the web, enabling them to focus on news coverage. It’s our experience that the appearance of a daily in the midst of such vitality does not diminish them. Usually, the competition raises the visibility of local news and advertising for most readers and businesses. What other community has four weeklies and two independent web sites serving it?
For the moment, we are distributing 4,000 copies throughout the city. Look for us in local restaurants and businesses. Hopefully we’ll be able to print more copies for you in the near future. It may take a while for the Santa Monica Daily Press to be everything you want us to be, but it will not be for lack of your help, encouragement, derision, and goading. Please feel free to do any of these. We’re downtown, at 530 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 200. Or reach us with tips, letters, advertising — or just to see if we’re still here — at (310)-458-PRESS (7737).
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 13, 2001. Read the original PDF.