Palo Alto's newspapers

Palo Alto argues in print. Letters about trees, trains and housing fill local pages every week. The city has rarely had just one paper to put them in. Over 130 years it has supported a family-owned daily, an employee-owned chain, a free weekly that went online before most newspapers had websites, two free tabloid dailies started by the same two men and a student paper whose fight with the local police reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

This page traces those papers in order. It sticks to what published histories say and avoids claims about current print schedules, which change often. Check each paper's own site for how and when it publishes now.

Before Palo Alto: the Mayfield Enterprise

The first local paper served the older town to the south. The Mayfield Enterprise was publishing by 1869, in both English and Spanish, a sign that Californio families still lived in the area. Our Mayfield page covers that town. Palo Alto itself had no paper until the university was under way and the townsite had filled with faculty, builders and shopkeepers.

The Palo Alto Times, 1893 to 1979

On January 5, 1893, W. V. Burr and Charles W. Jones published the first edition of the Palo Alto Times. The town had not yet incorporated. Ownership changed often in the early years. A rival weekly, the Palo Alto Live Oak, started in 1896 and merged with the Times in June 1900. In 1905 the Times absorbed another weekly called the Palo Alton. The merged paper became a daily.

The paper's long era began in 1919, when George F. Morell and Dallas E. Wood bought it for less than $25,000. Morell ran the business side. Wood edited the paper and wrote a daily column. In 1923 they launched the Redwood City Tribune and in 1936 they bought the Burlingame Advance-Star. The papers were run by Peninsula Newspapers Inc., an employee-owned company. By 1969 the group had 626 employees and a combined circulation of 117,533.

For most of the 20th century the Times was the city's record. It covered council fights, school openings and the electronics firms rising in the Stanford Industrial Park. Historians still cite its pages. A 1964 Times story, for example, documented the last trains on the Mayfield Cutoff to Los Altos.

The Times Tribune and its closing

The 1970s were hard on afternoon dailies. The Burlingame paper closed in March 1973. Wood died in January 1974 at 87. In 1977 the Chicago-based Tribune Company agreed to buy the group. Employee stockholders approved the $28 million sale that December. The Times then had a circulation of about 45,000 and the Tribune about 20,000.

In March 1979 the two papers merged as the Peninsula Times Tribune. Circulation kept falling. The paper laid off a fifth of its staff in July 1992 and was put up for sale that November with about 38,000 readers. No buyer came. The Peninsula Times Tribune printed its last issue on March 12, 1993, ending a century of daily news in Palo Alto.

The paper's memory survived. In July 1994 the City Council agreed to take its archive, 39 file cabinets and 69 boxes of clippings, photographs and microfilm. It arranged to have the collection professionally organized for local historical groups, including the Palo Alto Historical Association. Our guide to Palo Alto libraries lists where to start a research visit.

The Stanford Daily

The campus paper is older than the city. It began in 1892 as The Daily Palo Alto, serving both the university and the town. It later took the name The Stanford Daily. It calls itself Stanford's only news outlet operating continuously since the university's birth.

Independence and the Supreme Court

In 1970 the Daily ran an opinion piece that named witnesses to a protest. President Richard Lyman called it a "journalistic atrocity" and worried about university liability. That fall the paper announced it would destroy unpublished photos of demonstrations so they could not be used in court.

In April 1971, after police broke up an occupation of a Stanford Hospital building, Palo Alto Police Chief James Zurcher sent officers to search the Daily's offices for photos. The paper sued with help from constitutional scholar Anthony Amsterdam. In Zurcher v. Stanford Daily, decided in 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the paper. Congress answered with the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, which limits searches of newsrooms. Meanwhile, in 1973, students had formed the nonprofit Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation and cut formal ties with the university. The 1960s campus protests behind all this are on our page about Palo Alto in the 1960s.

Scoops and pranks

After Cal beat Stanford with "The Play" in 1982, the Daily printed a fake edition of Cal's student paper announcing that the NCAA had awarded the Big Game to Stanford and handed out 7,000 copies in Berkeley. In the early 1990s a Daily reporter exposed embezzlement by managers of the Stanford Bookstore. In 2022 and 2023 the paper reported on image manipulation in research papers co-authored by university president Marc Tessier-Lavigne, coverage that preceded his 2023 resignation. Since 2008 the Daily has worked from the Lorry I. Lokey Stanford Daily Building near Old Union.

The Palo Alto Weekly and Palo Alto Online

In 1979, the same year the daily Times merged with the Tribune, William Johnson's Embarcadero Publishing Company founded the Palo Alto Weekly as a free alternative. It was delivered to homes by mail and carried long local stories, arts listings and pages of letters. When the Times Tribune closed in 1993, the Weekly began publishing twice a week to fill the gap.

In January 1994 the Weekly began posting all of its content on a website called Palo Alto Online. That was very early for a newspaper. The site is often described as one of the first community news sites on the web. The company was renamed Embarcadero Media in 2009. That September the Weekly went back to a single Friday edition.

Johnson led the company until 2022 and was succeeded as chief executive by Adam Dawes. In November 2023 the company announced it would become a nonprofit, now the Embarcadero Media Foundation, citing print ad revenue down more than 42 percent since the end of 2019. Its newsroom unionized that fall. Jocelyn Dong edited the Weekly from 2011. Sarah Wright succeeded her in 2024. The foundation also publishes The Almanac in Menlo Park and the Mountain View Voice. The Weekly co-hosts the city's Moonlight Run each fall.

The Palo Alto Daily News

When Palo Alto lost its daily in 1993, two newspapermen saw an opening. Dave Price and Jim Pavelich launched the free Palo Alto Daily News on December 7, 1995, with a press run of 3,000 copies, distributed in red racks and coffee shops. It turned a profit within nine months. They added editions in San Mateo, Redwood City, Burlingame, Los Gatos and the East Bay.

In February 2005 Knight Ridder bought the Daily News and its sister papers for $25 million. After Knight Ridder's breakup in 2006 the papers passed to MediaNews Group. The Palo Alto title was folded into a combined Daily News in April 2009, with offices on the edge of Menlo Park. Its print run shrank to three days a week in 2013 and one day a week in 2015.

The Daily Post

Price and Pavelich were not done. In May 2008 they announced a new free paper, the Palo Alto Daily Post. They moved into the Daily News's old office at 324 High Street downtown. Its first hire was Diana Diamond, a former Daily News editor who had been fired in 2006. Wikipedia describes it as a free paper printed Monday through Saturday, mixing local reporting with wire stories.

At first the Post put no news online at all. Its website once said that "giving away news online is a dumb way to do business." By 2018 the site carried stories, though the paper still urges readers to pick up print for some of them.

At a glance

Researching with old papers

Old newspapers are the backbone of local history. They record what people argued about at the time, not what they remembered later. The Palo Alto Historical Association holds much of the Times Tribune archive. Stanford's Special Collections and University Archives and the Stanford Historical Society help with campus history. The Stanford Daily keeps a digitized archive covering 1892 to 2014. Many Times pages from the early 20th century can also be searched in commercial newspaper databases. For council records, minutes and agendas, see our guide to city government.

Frequently asked questions