Mark Twain and The Sacramento Union

The Missouri-born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who is better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, is remembered most for his contributions to The Union. This point was evident through the large bronze bust of Twain, which sat just west of the State Capitol in the lobby of The Union’s latter building at 301 Capitol Mall.

Mark Twain in his old age

Inscribed on the bust were Twain’s words: “Early in 1866, George Barnes invited me to resign my reportership on his paper, the San Francisco Morning Call, and for some months thereafter, I was without money or work; then I had a pleasant turn of fortune. The proprietors of the Sacramento Union, a great and influential daily journal, sent me to the Sandwich Islands to write four letters a month at twenty dollars a piece. I was there for four or five months, and returned to find myself about the best known man on the Pacific Coast.”

Twain dispatched a series of articles on Hawaii for The Union in 1866. These were very popular, and many historians credit the series with turning Twain into a journalistic star. Because many people thought that Twain wrote in The Union building, whenever The Union was struggling financially during the turn of the 20th century, the owners would drag out an old desk and sell it for a princely sum as "the desk where Mark Twain sat."

Unfortunately, said Charlotte Gilmore, former head of The Union's “morgue” or bound volumes collection, the original Twain articles were cut out and stolen from The Union's bound volumes during the 1970s.

“Sometime after I left in the summer of 1971, it happened,” Gilmore said. “It’s a very disappointing situation, but at least the (Twain) articles were photographed (for microfilm) before this happened.”

The Union's bound volumes, as well as the bronze bust of Twain, are now in the possession of the Shields Library at UC Davis, having been donated by the Danel and Reboin families, owners of the Herald Printing Co. The Twain articles can be viewed on microfilm at the Sacramento Public Library's central location at 828 I St.

Late 20th century

In 1966, the paper was purchased by Copley Press, which brought in millions of dollars that resulted in improvements such as the 1967 construction of the publication's Capitol Mall headquarters and a new long-run, photo-offset press. During those years it was the dominant morning newspaper in Sacramento. Then, in the mid-1970s, the Bee, previously an afternoon newspaper, decided to go head-to-head with the Union as a morning newspaper and promised that the Bee would arrive on the doorstep by 6:00 a.m. The Union circulation department couldn't equal that service, and the Bee quickly became the larger of the two dailies. While the Bee had a much larger staff, the Union beat the Bee on a number of huge stories. Among them were the Dorothea Puente Victorian grave sites and the investigative reporting that led to the resignation of California Department of Education Superintendent Bill Honig.

Copley sold the Union to conservative financier Richard Mellon Scaife in 1977. While there were reports that Scaife lost millions of dollars every year on the newspaper, he enjoyed having a conservative voice in the capital of the largest liberal state in the union. In the late 1980s, the newspaper changed from the standard broadsheet size to a tabloid, and the Union launched a marketing campaign called "Grab the Tab." For the most part, it was a failure and the paper suffered losses in circulation.

In 1989, Scaife sold the Union to local real estate developers Daniel Benvenuti Jr. and David Kassis. They hired Joseph Farah as editor. Under Farah's editorship, the paper veered even further to the right and became, in the words of a former Union journalist, "a mouthpiece for the fundamentalist Christian right, preoccupied with abortion, homosexuals and creationism."^[4] Benvenuti and Kassis sold the newspaper's press in 1991 to a Mexican town and had the paper printed at Herald Printing. In 1992, Herald's president Ralph Danel Jr. acquired the Union from Benvenuti and Kassis in November 1992; the selling price was in large part the debt that Benvenuti and Kassis owed Herald for its printing services.

The newspaper in 1991 and 1992 ran a series of investigative reports that revealed that then-state Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig had directed state education officials to contract with a company run by his wife, Nancy, out of their San Francisco home, that was designed to get parents more involved in their children's education. At Honig's direction, state funds were ultimately used to pay employees of Nancy Honig's company, the Quality Education Project (QEP). Bill Honig was later indicted and convicted on conflict-of-interest charges, although the felonies were later reduced to misdemeanors. Honig, who had been rumored to be a candidate for California governor, attributed the investigation to Republicans who didn't want him to win higher office.

In an attempt to reduce losses, circulation was dropped outside of the Sacramento metro area and, two months before its closure, publication was changed from seven days a week to three days a week. The formerly daily Union published its final edition on Friday, January 14, 1994. The cover featured a color photo of the paper's last staff under the blaring headline, "We're History," coined by the newspaper's last editor, Ken Harvey.

2005: Sacramento Union Magazine

Type	Alternative weekly
Format	Tabloid
Owner(s)	The Sacramento Union, LLC
Publisher	J.C. Dutra
Editor	J.C. Dutra
Managing editor	Bruce Edgar Slaton Jr
Founded	2006
Language	English
Headquarters	PO Box 748 Sacramento, CA 95812  United States
Circulation	62,000
Website	www.TheSacramentoUnion.com

The road to the rebirth of The Union in its newspaper form began in early 2004, when the name of the newspaper was acquired for the purpose of restarting the publication.

To meet its goals, the new Union set up offices in Fair Oaks and worked with former Union publishing staff to prepare for its return.

In August 2004, a modernized Sacramento Union returned with bimonthly magazines, then started publishing monthly in May 2005. James H. Smith, a former publisher of the Sacramento Union newspaper and co-founder of the Western Journalism Center with Farah, served as publisher, and Kenneth E. Grubbs Jr., former director of the National Journalism Center who had also worked for the Orange County Register, served as editor.

The publishers did not intend to return as a print daily newspaper, concentrating instead on web and magazine publishing.

Due to its very limited success, the magazine ceased existing after only five issues. Much of the office staff was laid off in May 2005.^[5]

Ryan Rose, The Union's current managing editor, served as the magazine's Web editor; he said that many people were confused upon seeing The Union as a magazine.

“We were known in this region for more than 100 years as a newspaper and then less than 10 years after The Union closed as a newspaper, we reissued it as a magazine and I firmly believe that the magazine suffered because we betrayed the brand,” Rose said.

After several months of dormancy, a new print edition of The Sacramento Union appeared on Friday, July 21, 2006, sporting a similar masthead as the magazine and the notation "Since 1851". The volume number in the paper was listed as "Volume 1, Number 1."

2006-2009: Tabloid

In 2006, The Sacramento Union was reborn as a tabloid-sized free weekly newspaper from 2006 to 2009. Published by the Sacramento Union, LLC, the paper also published a daily news website. J.C. Dutra was The Union's publisher and editor-in-chief. The paper was conservative in tone.

The Sacramento Union suspended publication of both the paper and the website in March 2009.

The Sacramento Union was acquired along with 45 other newspapers across the United States by a holding company controlled by Bruce Edgar Slaton Jr. for an undisclosed price.