| Type | Daily newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Broadsheet |
| Owner | MediaNews Group |
| Publisher | Dave Kuta |
| Editor | Kimberly Wear |
| Founded | 1854 |
| Headquarters | 930 6th Street Eureka, California 95501 United States |
| Circulation | 23,000 |
| Official website | times-standard.com |
The Times-Standard is the only major local daily newspaper covering the far North Coast of California. Headquartered in Eureka, the paper provides coverage of international, national, state and local news in addition to entertainment, sports, and classified listings. On the local level, the paper extensively covers all of Humboldt County while providing partial coverage of neighboring Del Norte, Mendocino, and Trinity counties. The newspaper is one of the oldest continuously published papers in all of California, with only several papers predating it by three years or less.
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After Eureka was formed in 1854, the Humboldt Times began publishing in what is known today as Old Town Eureka. The first issue of the Humboldt Times was printed on September 2, 1854.
Over the years, the Times had much in the way of competition, most notably from the Humboldt Standard, which began publishing in 1875. After a lengthy period of spirited competition and then a period of joint ownership with separate operations, the two papers merged in 1967 to form what is now the Times-Standard.[1] According to the newspaper's "about us" section on its web page, moving day came on December 7, 1968. Staff writer Andrew Genzoli later recalled, "There hadn’t been so much excitement in the newsroom since Pearl Harbor".
Over the years, Humboldt County has been the home to many other newspapers — some of which appear in a flash, others which last for decades. They include the Humboldt Bay Journal (1865–1867), National Index (1867–1868), Humboldt Bay Democrat (1868), Northern Independent (1869–1872) and finally the West Coast Signal which began in 1871 and lasted until 1880. The advent of the telegraph in the 1870s encouraged the development of even more newspapers, some dailies and some weeklies. They included the Evening Star (1876–1878), Evening Herald (1879), Eureka News/News/Semi-Weekly News (1881) and finally Western Watchman (1884–1898) and Humboldt Mail (1887–1890).
For a time the Times-Standard was the only daily newspaper of Humboldt County. In 1967, it passed out of local, family ownership into a newspaper chain, Brush-Moore Newspapers, which was acquired by Thomson Newspapers the same year. Thomson owned the Times-Standard until 1996 when it was bought by Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group, which owns it to this day.[1]
From 2003 to 2008, the Times-Standard was the subject of vigorous competition through the establishment of another daily newspaper, The Eureka Reporter. Humboldt County, with a population of not much more than 120,000, was a small area to feature two daily newspapers. In late 2008, The Eureka Reporter announced that it would cease operations. [2]