Daily Times-Advocate

Daily Times-Advocate
	Front page of the January 27, 1916 edition
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Publisher	John M. Armstrong
Editor	Richard K. Petersen
Founded	1909
Language	English
Ceased publication	1995
Headquarters	Escondido, California
Sister newspapers	The Californian (Temecula) and Fallbrook Enterprise

The Daily Times-Advocate, also called the Escondido Times-Advocate, was a daily newspaper published in Escondido, California. It was founded in 1909 and ceased publication as a separate title in 1995.

History

The Daily Times-Advocate was founded in 1909 following the merger of two weekly papers, The Escondido Times (founded by A. J. Lindsey in 1886) and The Escondido Advocate (founded by A. D. Dunn in 1891). Also known later as the Escondido Times-Advocate, it was one of the longest-standing institutions in Escondido's history.^[5] It had been bought by the Appleby family in the early 1960s with Carlton R. Appleby becoming its publisher. Appleby sold the paper in 1977 to Tribune Publishing who at the time were buying up a number of other Southern California papers.^[6]

The newspaper expanded its holdings in 1988 to include The Californian in Temecula and Fallbrook Enterprise, both purchased from longtime owner Marmack Publishing Co.^[7]

In 1990, the Times-Advocate was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Explanatory Journalism for its coverage of a shooting spree by an Escondido mail carrier and an examination of the challenges faced by Postal Service workers.^[8]

In 1995, Tribune Publishing sold its Southern California holdings, including its largest one, the Times-Advocate, to Howard Publications. At the time of the sale, the Times-Advocate had a circulation of 40,000.^[9] Oceanside's North County Blade-Citizen and the Times-Advocate were merged that year to form the North County Times.^[10] That paper ceased publication as a separate title in 2013 when it was bought by The San Diego Union-Tribune and merged into the larger paper to become its North County edition.^[11]^[12]

The Times-Advocate's final publisher was John M. Armstrong and its final editor was Richard K. Petersen.^[13]^[14]^[15]

The "Times-Advocate" name, which had fallen into the public domain, was revived by real estate broker Kelly Crews for a completely different publication in 2014. Crews sold that publication to the proprietor of the Valley Roadrunner in January 2016.^[16]^[17]

Former staff and contributors

In 1979 photographer Len Lahman quit his job at the Los Angeles Times to begin a one-year personal project documenting the lives of California's migrant workers and the toll their living and working conditions had taken on them. His photo essay, pioneering for its time, was rejected by numerous publications, including National Geographic. He finally found a publisher in the Times-Advocate who ran it in 1980 as a 16-page supplement entitled Faces Beyond the Border. The following year, Lehman won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for the piece.^[18] A 1987–1988 series of stories by Catherine Spearnak for the Times-Advocate and San Diego Magazine on the unsolved murders of San Diego women involved in prostitution led to the establishment of San Diego's multi-agency Metropolitan Homicide Task Force.^[19]

Other staff or contributors who worked for the newspaper in their early careers include:

James W. Huston (1953–2016), lawyer and author known for his military and legal thrillers who wrote op-eds for the Times-Advocate in the early 1990s^[20]
Mary Jacobus (1957–2009), newspaper executive and former manager of the Boston Globe who was director of sales and marketing at the Times-Advocate in the 1980s^[21]^[22]
Armen Keteyian (1953–), journalist and author who worked as a sports and feature writer for the paper from 1978 to 1980^[23]
Jim Toomey (1960–), whose comic strip Sherman's Lagoon was first published in the Times-Advocate in 1991 and went on to national syndication^[24]