Neil Morgan's ‘Fatherly Advice' To Tribune Staff Recalled On 30th Anniversary Of U-T

By Ken Stone, Times of San Diego

February 3, 2022

Veterans of San Diego’s one-time rival-but-sister dailies Tuesday marked the 30th anniversary of the merger that yielded The San Diego Union-Tribune.

But the morning San Diego Union effectively swallowed The Tribune, an afternoon paper famed for its two Pulitzers and final edition printed on light green newsprint — the Green Sheet.

Before the Feb. 2, 1992, U-T merger, however, scores of Tribune staffers got a “little piece of fatherly advice” from their editor, 67-year-old Neil Morgan, a legend in San Diego media.

I was one of them.

That day — Friday, Jan. 31, 1992 — I wore a tie (a rarity for a news copy editor) and made the 4 a.m. commute from my Vista condo to Mission Valley with a camcorder and goal to document history. I framed it as a “day in the life” video intended for my toddler son.

Over 90 minutes, I ambushed colleagues and recorded Morgan and others during the paper’s last monthly staff meeting — summoned as usual by his honk of a bike horn.

Morgan read the names of the 60 Trib staffers who wouldn’t continue on with the morning paper — on account of layoffs, buyouts and retirements. Then he shared his wisdom.

“Partly because some of us are going for the first time into an a.m. (publication) time slot, we’re in a position of receiving a bit of instruction,” he began. “I just want to urge all of you not to allow that to change anything about what you’ve been doing or how you’ve been doing it.”

He said he wasn’t suggesting any “belligerence.” Neither was he urging an “uprising.”

“But … be yourselves, be proud of what you have done,” Morgan said.

Morgan, a longtime “three-dot” city columnist and author, joined the new U-T as an associate editor and senior columnist but was let go in 2004. (He soon went on to inspire the founding of Voice of San Diego, the online news site.)

Helen Copley, the publisher who announced the September 1991 decision to unite the Copley papers, insisted on an equal merger, Morgan told his staff, “because she wanted the Tribune spice and excitement and, I believe, the informality and sense of fun.”

He added: “Realize that there wouldn’t be 131 us moving over if all of you weren’t coveted.”

Bob Witty, Morgan’s deputy editor who helped craft the merger, told the third-floor Tribune troops on their last day together: “We can all be proud, when we look back on our careers, that we worked for a really good newspaper. … We owe it all to our editor.”

A 1991 Los Angeles Times story said The Tribune’s circulation peaked at 133,711 in 1979, and only one of the nation’s top 25 papers was circulated in the afternoon.

San Diego newsmakers mostly mourned The Tribune, which won Pulitzers for on-deadline coverage of the 1979 PSA mid-air crash in North Park and Jonathan Freedman’s series of immigration editorials in 1987.

“One down and one to go,” former Mayor Roger Hedgecock said of The Tribune.

He told the Times that the afternoon paper wasn’t as bad as the Union, “but (The Tribune) still was part of what in effect was a bizarre reign of terror by a publisher who tried to determine the community’s political, business and social agenda. With that fig leaf of respectability that the Tribune gave now gone, that issue may come into sharper relief.”

Helen Copley died at 81 in August 2004 — three years after naming her son, David, publisher. On her passing, he was quoted as saying: “As she did, I will proudly keep our newspapers going.”

But thanks to changing media economics (and some say David’s mismanagement), the U-T was sold in March 2009 to private investment group Platinum Equity of Beverly Hills — the first in a series of post-Copley owners.

Morgan, who was named “Mr. San Diego 1999” by the San Diego Rotary Club, was labeled “a loving but uncommon scold to San Diego” by former San Diego mayor and California Gov. Pete Wilson.

“In an interesting duality of roles, he has been San Diego’s chief cheerleader, the very halcyon of optimism; he has also been the critic of San Diego, who insists that we still do better,” Wilson said, according to a U-T obituary.

Morgan died at 89 on Feb. 1, 2014 — a day before the 22nd anniversary of his “country paper in the city” merging with the Union.

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