By James Preston Allen, Publisher

The Daily Breeze again has accomplished that which only it can do, killing one of its own creations, as of last Saturday they published the last edition of More San Pedro, the faux community weekly newspaper used to compete in the San Pedro market. They canceled this publication and fired nine workers and have once again shown the communities of the San Pedro region their lack of commitment to community based journalism and civic debate as opposed to their corporate bottom line. Many locals will recall the similar fate of the other once Copley owned paper the San Pedro News Pilot which closed its doors nine years ago when the former corporate owners of the Daily Breeze abruptly stopped publishing the “fish wrapper” and promised to print a “Harbor edition” of their core paper.

 Subsequently the Copley News corporation, the last family owned newspaper group in the nation, fell on hard times after their matron CEO Helen Copley died. With sagging circulation figures and falling revenues the corporation sold out two years ago to Dean Singleton, owner of the Daily News, for a fraction of the book value of the South Bay News group–$25 million. Some speculate that this price reflects the true value of its holdings and that their published circulation figures were not truly reported. Why else would they have sold out for one third of its market price?

Along with the LA flag ship paper, the Daily Breeze, were the Manhattan Beach Reporter, the PV News and More San Pedro. Now Singleton’s Media News conglomerate owns both local dailies– the Press Telegram and the Breeze– giving it a monopoly position in the territory between Palos Verdes and Long Beach. The killing of More San Pedro may have more to do with not competing against their other publication San Pedro Magazine which is seen by locals as a kind of “news lite” which some local advertisers and readers have mistaken as being a locally based publication, it is not.

The closing of the More San Pedro follows on the footsteps of a national trend by large corporate owned newspaper groups concerned strictly with their bottom-line stock values and not committed to their core products of reporting the news and informing the public. While some media experts blame the Internet for the substantial loss of newspaper readers nationally, especially those under the median age of 36, the trend has mostly affected daily newspapers as they have reduced key news coverage and are perceived by younger readers as having “sold out to the man.” What the media giants don’t understand is that in the past several years especially during the War in Iraq readers perceive that they are not being told the truth and that the reporting by the main stream media can’t be trusted so readers have naturally turned to other sources.

The American public is still hungry for the truth but are being starved with “infotainment” and “news lite” by the corporate media that increasingly blurs the lines between advertising, public relations and real news–and the readers are smart enough to know the difference. The corporate main stream media continues to pander to corporate advertisers often using press releases and government planted “news items” instead of independent or investigative reporting.

It is a sad day to see another publication like More San Pedro fall victim to the avarice of corporate greed but I take little comfort in saying that I told you so. Once again this newspaper has stood the test of competition against one of the media giants and out survived them but my earnest concern is that there are now nine young journalists and other newspaper workers who are now jobless. They are joined by hundreds if not thousands of others across this nation who will no longer be allowed to follow their careers of writing for the public benefit, which is the foundation of what journalism essentially is. When the corporate media finally realizes this it may be too late for both them and the democracy that they should serve.