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 original publishers were Jim Pavelich and
Dave Price. 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 San Mateo County, although within two years, other free dailies started 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 served
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 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 $25 million. Price and Pavelich, the publishers, were asked to stay on during the transition, but they left by the end of the year. In May 2005,
the Daily News launched the
East Bay Daily News, which served
Berkeley,
Emeryville,
Piedmont,
Albany and the
Oakland neighborhood of
Rockridge. In January 2006, Shareef Dajani, formerly general manager of the Knight Ridder-owned Hills Newspapers, a group of weeklies in Alameda County, was named publisher. In March, Dajani fired editor
Diana Diamond, a long-time Palo Altan who was also a columnist. Her dismissal triggered numerous letters-to-the-editor and the competing Palo Alto Weekly picked up her column. Dajani replaced Diamond with Lucinda Ryan, who had worked with him at the Hills Newspapers. 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 — closed in August 2006. However, a lawsuit filed by San Francisco real estate developer Clint Reilly challenged the sale on anti-trust grounds. The suit was settled with Hearst and MediaNews agreeing not to work together on national advertising or distribution. In January 2007, Dajani was replaced by Carole Leigh Hutton, former editor and publisher of the
Detroit Free Press when it was owned by Knight Ridder. When Knight Ridder sold the Free Press to
Gannett on August 3, 2005, Hutton was named Knight Ridder's vice president of news, a position she held until the company folded in 2006. In March 2007, former Oakland Tribune editor Mario Dianda replaced Lucinda Ryan as executive editor. In May 2008, Daily News founders Dave Price and Jim Pavelich announced that they were reviving the original paper, in its original headquarters at 324 High St., under the name
Palo Alto Daily Post. In June 2008, the Daily News laid off five newsroom workers and eliminated its Monday edition in Palo Alto and its Tuesday edition in San Mateo, Redwood City and Burlingame. Those three cities had lost their Monday edition two years earlier. In August 2008, it came to light that the Daily News had hired a company in India to manage writing, copy-editing and design of a weekly real-estate product. In April 2009, the Daily News dropped its Sunday edition and editions for San Mateo, Burlingame and Redwood City. After
McClatchy's acquisition of Knight Ridder in early 2006, all six
Daily News editions, were bundled with the
San Jose Mercury News and sold to
MediaNews Group of
Denver, Colorado. The surviving
Daily News papers merged on April 7, 2009. ==References==