Tribune name change further erodes Oakland's clout

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | 8/26/11 | Chip Johnson

[SmithL]

My head tells me the Oakland Tribune, the Chronicle's main competitor in the East Bay, will go on under a new name, but my heart tells a different story.

Starting in early November, the Oakland Tribune and four smaller daily newspapers will operate under a single flag: the East Bay Tribune.

The announcement, made Tuesday by the Bay Area News Group, which owns the Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News and 11 community papers in the Bay Area, closes an era in Oakland. The Oakland Tribune has been serving the residents of the community for 137 years.

The historic Tribune tower on 13th Street in downtown Oakland has been the most recognizable feature on the Oakland skyline for more than a century, an architectural icon as accurate as a GPS locator. The newspaper moved all operations out of the building in 2007.

The new, more generic name is a nod that Oakland is no longer the straw the stirs the drink in these parts and reflects the departure of residents, jobs and resources out of central cities and into the suburban enclaves that have sprung up all around them.

[SmithL]

fyi

[martin_fierro]

Comrade Ron's Mongo-Bongo Anarchy Gazette has a nice ring to it.

[Owl558]

They can change the name a hundred times and I still won’t buy their crappy, leftist product.

[bunkerhill7]

I was copyboy and weather editor for the Trib in 1965. It was fun running all over the place with the news hot off the wire. The boss even let me monitor the newsfeed and pick a lead which I though was the hottest lead story to run down to the presses for the test pinks. I really ran too coz the elevator was too slow. `Copy! Copy!`

[GATOR NAVY]

My father lived in Oakland during WWII, my grandfather worked at the Kaiser yards building Liberty ships. He has fond memories of the place as it was then, nothing like the sh*thole it is now.