Palo Alto Daily News
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The Palo Alto Daily News is a free daily newspaper serving Palo Alto, California. It is published seven days a week and has a circulation of 67,000 (a figure that includes all of its zoned editions). The Daily News is distributed in red newspaper racks and in stores, coffee shops, restaurants, schools and major workplaces.
[edit] Format and content
The Daily News has a distinctive format. Pages are 16 inches long and 10.75 inches wide, dimensions which are thought to make the Daily News easier to hold than traditional broadsheet papers, but allow more stories to be published per page than a typical tabloid. Advertisements are found at the bottom of the front page and on every inside page. The page count of the paper ranges from 56 to 120 per day.
The newspaper prints a combination of local stories and news from a number of wire services including The Associated Press, Bay City News, The New York Times and McClatchy-Tribune (the former Knight-Ridder Tribune). Local columnists include Diana Diamond, John Angell Grant, Larry Magid and John Reid. Syndicated opinion columns include those by Bob Herbert, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd.
[edit] History
The Palo Alto Daily News debuted on December 7, 1995 with an initial circulation of 3,000. Within nine months, the paper was in the black. The paper generates all of its revenue from advertising. The original publishers, Jim Pavelich and Dave Price, understood that the advertising would reach more potential customers if the paper were free and thus widely available.
The newspaper's press run is determined by consumer demand; by 1997, the circulation had nearly tripled to 10,000 copies a day.
On August 9, 2000, the newspaper expanded into San Mateo County by opening three dailies, the San Mateo Daily News, Redwood City Daily News and Burlingame Daily News. These became the first free daily newspapers in the county, although within two years, other copycat free dailies would start in that area, replicating the format of the Daily News.
On May 15, 2002, the Daily News launched the Los Gatos Daily News. In addition to Los Gatos, it serves Saratoga, Campbell, Cupertino and western San Jose.
In the first quarter of 2003, the combined circulation of the Daily News reached 55,000 per day, and on March 23 a home-delivered Sunday edition was added.
On November 12, 2004, the Redwood City Daily News beat the competition by putting out an "extra" minutes after a jury in Redwood City convicted Scott Peterson of murdering his wife Laci and their unborn son.
On February 15, 2005, Knight Ridder, then the nation's second-largest newspaper publisher, bought the Palo Alto Daily News and its four sister papers for an undisclosed amount. Price and Pavelich, the publishers, were asked to stay on during the transition, but they left by the end of the year.
In May of the same year, the Daily News launched the East Bay Daily News, which serves Berkeley, Emeryville, Piedmont, Albany and the Oakland neighborhood of Rockridge.
In March 2006, Knight Ridder agreed to be purchased by The McClatchy Company, owner of the Sacramento Bee among other papers. McClatchy later announced it would sell 12 of the 32 Knight Ridder dailies, including the San Jose Mercury News and two other regional papers, The Monterey County Herald and the Contra Costa Times. The Palo Alto Daily News, along with other papers, was included in the Mercury News' 'bundle,' to be sold as one entity. MediaNews Group, which already owned several area papers, agreed to acquire the Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, Monterey County Herald and the St. Paul Pioneer Press of Minnesota for $1 billion, with $263 million of that coming from the Hearst Corporation, owner of the San Francisco Chronicle. The two deals — the sale of Knight Ridder to McClatchy, and McClatchy's sale to MediaNews — are scheduled to close in early July 2006 if they are approved by state and federal antitrust regulators.
