Daily Breeze

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Daily Breeze
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet

Owner	Media News, Inc.
Publisher	Mark Ficarro
Editor	Phillip Sanfield
Founded	1894
Headquarters	5215 Torrance Blvd. Torrance, CA 90503-4077 United States

Website: DailyBreeze.com

The Daily Breeze is a 70,000-circulation daily newspaper published in Torrance, California. It serves the South Bay cities of Los Angeles County, and produces a weekly supplement in San Pedro.

[edit] Early history

The paper was founded as the weekly The Breeze in 1894 by local political activist S.D. Barkley and first served the local Redondo Beach community. Coverage eventually spread to other coastal cities, and by 1922, it had become a daily publication. In the late 1920s, the Daily Breeze became part of Copley family holdings. The competition went out-of-business in 1970 [TheTorrance Herald, 1913-1969].

In the late 1970s, reports began surfacing in the American media that the Copley Press was being used as a front by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Reporters Joe Trento and Dave Roman claimed that James S. Copley, who served as publisher until 1973, had cooperated with the CIA since its founding in 1947. They also reported that a subsidiary division, Copley News Service, was used in Latin America by the CIA as a front.

[edit] Modern history

Like most of the newspaper industry, the Daily Breeze has suffered its share of hardships, with the rise of free news on the Internet and the competitive Los Angeles media market.

In 2005, it added to its circulation numbers through the purchase of two local weeklies, the Beach Reporter and Palos Verdes Peninsula News. In 2003, it created another weekly, More San Pedro, in the Harbor Area.

In Dec. 2006, the paper was sold to the Hearst Corporation in a complex transaction that left the paper under the day-to-day control of Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group and its subsidiary, the Los Angeles Newspaper Group (LANG). Singleton announced that he would fold the paper into the LANG operations, but not cut salaries. Singleton will eventually come to own the Daily Breeze under a 2007 plan to acquire ownership of the paper as part of a swap with Hearst in which Hearst would trade some California papers and the St. Paul Pioneer Press for an increased stake in Singleton's non-California operations.