The U-T purchase by investor Alden Global Capital, announced Monday, July 10,  comes during turbulent times in the newspaper industry as audience and advertising are increasingly absorbed by search and social media companies. The U-T will be operated by Alden-controlled MediaNews Group, which also runs the 11 newspapers of the Southern California News Group.

“This valued acquisition enables MediaNews Group to advance its stewardship in California as the largest provider of news and information across the state as we continue our commitment to ensure newspapers remain viable well into the future,” said Sharon Ryan, executive vice president of California for MediaNews Group.

Alden’s purchase will grow the California reach of MediaNews Group which owns the Southern California News Group and more than a dozen newspapers in Northern California, including those with the Bay Area News Group.

A memo to the U-T staff announcing the deal said the Union-Tribune will need to “make some difficult staffing decisions as we assume management. Reductions will be necessary to offset the slowdown in revenues as economic headwinds continue to impact the media industry. We will seek efficiencies in business operations, distribution, and production while striving to support and prioritize the robust, local newsgathering needed to serve the communities that rely on the Union-Tribune for excellence in journalism.”

Cooperation between the U-T and SCNG newsrooms may be part of the future newsgathering operations, but sources close to the deal said it was too early for any specific announcements.

The memo highlights the financial stress created by Big Tech giants who’ve successfully lured readers and advertising away from newspapers – often by using  the newspaper industry’s own work.

“It’s no secret that our industry faces substantial revenue pressures brought on by big tech aggregators who redistribute our original content for their own profit, at the expense of our staff, diminishing our readership and causing declining advertising and circulation revenues,” the memo stated, “Despite impressive news reporting and a hardworking staff, the U-T has not been immune to these pressures.”

The U-T has San Diego roots that date to 1868. It was bought by Tribune Publishing in 2015 and then acquired along with the Los Angeles Times by Soon-Shiong three years later. The Times recently announced it was eliminating 74 positions in its newsroom, or roughly 13% of the staff.

A statement from the Los Angeles Times said the Soon-Shiong family “made a good faith effort to rebuild and support both news organizations. We hope that this change now will position both the L.A. Times and San Diego Union-Tribune to succeed. The ongoing work of transforming the L.A. Times into a self-sustaining institution will be our focus, as we believe that Los Angeles needs and deserves a strong, independent news organization.”

U-T editor and publisher Jeff Light commented in the paper’s story about the sale.

“I’m grateful to the Soon-Shiong family, who were good owners,” he said. “Now it’s time to start another chapter. As our staff knows, this isn’t an easy business, but I have a lot of confidence in the future of the Union-Tribune.”

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As always, we love to hear from our readers. If you want to reach us, our reporters’ email addresses are on every story we post. You can also send your feedback to us at commenting@medianewsgroup.com. We are also active on social media, and we would be delighted if you would follow us on Twitter or visit our Facebook page where we can continue the conversation. And if you have a strong opinion you’d like to see published, you can send us a letter to the editor at opinion@scng.com.

Related: Dilbert’s Scott Adams says ‘White people should get the hell away from Black people’

Southern California News Group believes that communities are strengthened by embracing diversity and striving for unity as opposed to divisiveness and provocation. With these values in mind, we cannot continue to publish Adams’ work for our audience.

Related: ‘Dilbert,’ Scott Adams lose distributor over racist remarks

Due to the timing of our production schedules, Dilbert will continue to appear in some editions, including this coming Sunday’s papers while the change is implemented.

The Southern California News Group publishes the Orange County Register, Los Angeles Daily News, The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Daily Breeze in Torrance, Long Beach Press-Telegram, The Sun in San Bernardino, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, Redlands Daily Facts, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Pasadena Star-News and Whittier Daily News.

Your subscription login remains the same for the new e-edition. In addition, you can still access it via our website, app or the daily email.

If you access the e-edition through one of our e-edition specific apps, those will update automatically to the new version without the need for you to download a new app. You will, however, need to re-login with the same credentials you have used in the past.

Check out what’s new with our refreshed design.

IMPROVED FEATURES

• Easier navigation – the tool bar appears across the top of the page with multiple arrows to direct you to more content

• Improved article readability – click anywhere on an article and it will pop up in text form with more options to increase visibility

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NEW FEATURES

• Clippings – use this tool to drag & create a clipping to share, download or print content
• Bookmarks – use this tool to save articles or pages to return to later

APP CHANGES

If you use one of our e-edition specific apps, you can continue using the same app but will notice some changes.

Popular features such as double tap to zoom, one-click to open an article to read, printing and changing the size of the text remain within the app.

You can explore those options and app settings at the bottom of the page.

You’ll find there is lots to explore with your refreshed e-edition. Delivery of our news content in a format that is beneficial to you is our number one priority. We continue to listen to our audiences for ways to improve, so we’re not done yet. Look for announcements on enhancements in the coming months.

Read more below for answers to frequently asked questions.

Will I still be able to print articles and pages of the newspaper from the e-edition?

Yes, there is still a print feature that is found in the navigation bar at the top or in the icons at the top of an article in the article reader.

Here is where it is found in the navigation bar on the main page:

And here is where it is found at the top of the article reader page:

In addition to printing, you can also save as a PDF using the same option or you can use the “download” button on the main navigation bar to simply download pages without printing.

Will I be able to search for articles within an edition or search past editions in your archive?

Yes, there is search functionality to find articles within an edition and an archive to search past editions. There is up to 30 day access to archived editions.

Is there still an index to jump to sections or pages?

The index feature from the previous e-edition has changed to help improve navigation and is now called Pages. It can be found in the bottom left corner of the e-edition and opened by clicking the tab.

You can see what it looks like here:

Once you click the Pages tab, it will open a view with section labels and a thumbnail view of pages that can also be clicked to load that page.

MENU FEATURES

There are also menu options on the far righthand side of the navigation bar. In order, these selections are:

• Section list – quickly jump to sections of today’s publication

The money will help editors study how local news readers interact with homepages differently across SCNG’s 11 websites, with the intention of boosting local readership and deepening engagement. The project will blend traditional news judgment and existing metrics with a Google machine learning tool.

The Innovation Challenge is part of the Google News Initiative, in which the company said it would give $300 million to help “journalism thrive in the digital age.” The SCNG project, led by Managing Editor Toni Sciacqua, was one of 34 chosen from 269 news applicants across the United States and Canada.

“This is a chance for us to see if we can use tech to improve the way we get our substantive local news more directly to readers,” Sciacqua said.

Print readers have always paid for the news, though to be fair, the price of a subscription often doesn’t cover even the cost of newsprint and delivery.

The truth is, news gathering has traditionally been funded by advertising, but in these days of declining print advertising, those print dollars just don’t go far enough, and online advertising just isn’t making up the difference.

Real news gathering – the kind done by professional journalists who put their names on their work and who are accountable for its accuracy, fairness and balance – is not cheap.

So this week, we’re launching a digital subscription program, asking those who read our news to support local journalism by subscribing.

The first four weeks is only 99 cents. After that, we’re asking $10 every four weeks. That’s about what you probably pay for any one of a number of streaming video services.

And we’re worth it. We bring you the news, and more importantly, the news that’s relevant to you because it’s near you. Local news.

Our journalists are real people who live in the communities we cover, who go to the places we write about, and who know the issues they cover. We’re real people, and we do real news.

We believe that good journalism serves the people. We take seriously our obligation to inform the public and to ensure government is accountable to the governed. We are committed to the truth, and we are, ourselves, accountable to our readers as well as to those we cover.

We always aspire to get it right, and when, on occasion, we make an error, we own up to it and fix it.

RELATED: FAQs on the digital subscription program

We believe that the free press is vital to democracy.

But news, unfortunately, is not free.

If you weren’t already a fan of local news, you would not be reading this.

We hope, therefore, that you’re fan enough to become part of the family.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe.

The Southern California News Group strives to correct errors and has accurate information in all our publications. Significant factual errors will be corrected and noted in the online article as well as in the newspaper, if applicable.

To report an error, please email online@scng.com, and submit what needs to be corrected, where the error was found (which page/section of the newspaper and/or the URL to the story) and any other additional information.

Articles which have been corrected after digital publication will appear at ocregister.com/tag/corrections.

Legal demands for corrections must be in writing and sent to the publisher at Box 11626, Santa Ana, CA 92711-1626.

There are 3 easy ways to request a vacation hold.

Online: ocregister.com/customerservice

Email:  customerservice@ocregister.com

Phone: 714-796-7777

Customer Service Hours:

Monday – Friday 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Saturday & Holidays 7 a.m. to 10 a.m.
Sunday 7 a.m. to 11 a.m.

Vacation Hold/Stop Options

When you contact us about your vacation hold, you will have three options for what will happen to your papers:

Vacation Pack – We will hold your papers and deliver them upon your return – up to 30 days.

Vacation Donation – Donate your vacation papers to local schools.

Vacation Stop – Delivery will stop while on vacation, no credit or extension is applied to the account.

If you are one of those people who prefers to use RSS feeds to follow the news, we make it easy.

For any page of our website, you can easily create an RSS feed.

Simply take the URL of that page (example: www.ocregister.com/news) and then add /feed to the end of the URL so it looks like this: www.ocregister.com/news/feed/. That will return an RSS feed for your use.

Using images of UFOs, mermaids and dragons as its visual foundation, the campaign playfully reiterates the value of fair and objective reporting that’s published by an established local news organization.

It contrasts the importance of consuming news produced by journalists that is fact-checked for accuracy by editors, versus reading questionable stories trying to pass as news from unknown or intentionally biased sources.

The campaign reminds digital audiences that they can streamline their news-consumption experience by reading reporting from trained journalists that report facts on behalf of reliable news organizations.

Print and digital ads with the UFO theme began in early February, and illustrate the vast difference between fantasy and reality with respect to the news you read.

Southern California News Group is sharing the campaign through posts to its company account and its 11 daily newspaper accounts on Facebook and Twitter. Many of the posts are accompanied by a #PressOn hashtag, which is being utilized by journalists and other news organizations. Some include links inviting people to subscribe and support local journalism.

The ads will also run in outside of its own media brands, mainly in promotional materials from its community partnerships.

Newspapers and websites within Southern California News Group include the Los Angeles Daily News, Daily Breeze in Torrance, Long Beach Press-Telegram, The Orange County Register, Pasadena Star-News, The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Whittier Daily News, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, The Sun in San Bernardino and Redlands Facts.