There are two major news sources in San Diego again -- something many natives of this big city never thought would be possible after the afternoon Tribune merged into the morning Union in 1992, creating the troubled Union-Tribune of today. Like a lot of formerly glorious family-owned daily papers in the United States, the U-T has been unable to adapt to the new news media landscape. It's shedding staff and dealing with a strange owner, an equity firm.
That's why it's good we have the Voice of San Diego, an online-only paper that is providing the city with a hard-nosed metro news feed that is by and by more comprehensive and dogged than the U-T. Right now its major front-page stories are a jailhouse interview with the first San Diegan prosecuted for armed robbery in pursuit of OxyContin, and a big scoop -- Barack Obama's likely choice for the next U.S. Attorney in San Diego.
On the other hand, the top local story at the U-T is ... a feature about the Christmas traditions of historic Old Town. In slightly more useful information for residents, the paper also lets us know today that the local cab industry is dominated by Somali immigrants.
The Voice is not a turn-around alternative to the print competition -- yet. It doesn't have a big enough staff to cover daily public safety news, which the U-T still does decently. The Union-Tribune also pays a fair amount of attention to breaking border-related news, as well. But in the over-all battle for more intelligent and aggressive coverage of local issues that matter to people, the Voice of San Diego is clearly in the lead.
I feel for the U-T, but I don't feel sorry for it. This is a city with a wide variety of news sources -- the Reader, CityBeat, Spanish-language papers, Asian-language papers, the African-American Voice & Viewpoint, LGBT papers. In the long-run, San Diegans have enough choices in their media diet to make a future without a "mainstream" daily newspaper not an altogether terrifying thing to look forward to.