The paper was founded as the weekly
The Breeze in 1894 by local political
activist S. D. Barkley and first served the local
Redondo Beach community. At that time the town had a population of 500 and included a few buildings and
Hotel Redondo. Barkley aligned himself with The Wets, a group of four local saloonkeepers who wanted to remain open while The Drys opposed alcohol consumption and fought to close them. In 1910, residents voted against closing them. Five years later in 1922, Orgibet sold the weekly paper to K.W. Kellogg, who then expanded it into a daily publication. In 1928,
Copley Press purchased the
Daily Breeze and 14 other paper from Kellogg Newspapers, Inc. In December 2006, the paper was sold by Copley Press to the
Hearst Corporation in a complex transaction that left the paper under the day-to-day control of Dean Singleton's
MediaNews Group and its subsidiary, the
Los Angeles Newspaper Group (LANG). Singleton announced that he would fold the paper into the LANG operations, but not cut salaries. Singleton will eventually come to own the
Daily Breeze under a 2007 plan to acquire ownership of the paper as part of a swap with Hearst in which Hearst would trade some California papers and the
St. Paul Pioneer Press for an increased stake in Singleton's non-California operations. In 2008, the paper ceased producing its weekly supplement,
More San Pedro. Nine staff members were laid off at the same time including four reporters, a web editor, and a newsroom assistant. In 2015, the
Daily Breeze won two major awards for its series of investigative reports, throughout 2014, regarding a financial scandal in the
Centinela Valley Union High School District. In March, the paper won a
Scripps Howard National Journalism Award for Community Journalism for the investigation, and in April the
Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. == In popular culture ==