It was one of the first newspapers in Arizona. And it would last — last through 138 gritty, glorious, once triumphant, then challenging, and finally flagging years.
Until today.
The Tucson Citizen, founded in 1870 when Arizona was a rough-and-tumble territory, rolls its final edition off the presses this morning. The paper plans to continue operating its Web site providing commentary and opinion but no news coverage.
"It's heartbreaking," said Mike Chihak, who served as Citizen editor and publisher before retiring from journalism last year.
Officials at publishing giant Gannett, owner of the Citizen, blamed the closure on drastically declining circulation and "the difficult economy."
For generations of readers and employees of Tucson's afternoon newspaper, this is a day for lament — but also for appreciation and fond memories. Here is a look back and farewell to a Tucson institution that is no more in printed form.
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Community connections
Hundreds, probably thousands, of Tucsonans have had a special connection with the Tucson Citizen — something beyond merely reading the paper. Among them:
• Joel D. Valdez
Valdez, who served as city manager of Tucson from 1974 to 1990 and is now senior vice president for business affairs at the University of Arizona, still proudly includes on his résumé the fact that he delivered the paper in his youth.
"Delivering the Citizen helped me pay bills during high school and pay my way through the university," Valdez said. "I started selling the paper at a corner downtown . . . and later I delivered it on a bicycle."
Reflecting on his many encounters with reporters and editors during his years as city manager, Valdez said that "I found the paper to be pretty accurate. And that's what I ask of a paper — to be accurate.
"I will miss the Citizen," said Valdez. "They've had some very good people on the staff such as Mark Kimble," the paper's associate editor. "I think he's a heck of a newspaper man."
The Citizen, Valdez added, "offered a different viewpoint. I relied on it for information that was sometimes different than what I read in the morning paper."
• Dianne Bret Harte
A family history intertwined with the Tucson Citizen makes the newspaper's demise "a personal loss to me," Bret Harte said.
Her grandfather, George H. Smalley, served as editor of the Citizen from 1898 to 1901. Her mother, Yndia Smalley Moore, wrote historical columns for the paper in the 1960s and '70s. And Bret Harte herself worked there as homes editor in the 1950s.
"I feel very sad to see what was a very strong local paper shut down," said Bret Harte, who is executive director of the Southwestern Foundation for Education and Historical Preservation. "Its voice is gone. The Citizen, to me, always represented such community support. To see that gone is really tough."
• Charles Bowden
Bowden, a Tucson author known for his evocative writing about desert country and his stark accounts of raw-edged life in border regions, worked as a reporter at the Citizen in the 1980s.
"The Citizen is where I learned to love newspapers, a love I have never lost," Bowden said. "It was also the last paper to cover Tucson. Now I live in a town where you can be murdered and it might not make your local paper."
• Shirley Chann
A member of the Arizona Commission on the Arts and several other arts and community organization boards, Chann said she will miss the Citizen's support of the arts in Tucson.
The paper has provided "contributions for the Tucson Symphony and other organizations over the years," Chann said. "I have memories of many of the people there. Bill Small (a former Citizen publisher) was a wonderful man."
Chann also had high praise for Citizen staffers Dan Buckley and Chuck Graham.
"Dan Buckley was a very knowledgeable music critic, and I was very disappointed when he was told not to review classical music anymore — supposedly because there was not enough interest in it," Chann said, calling this an example of the Citizen's falling short on arts support.
"But Chuck Graham reviewed all the plays and especially the community theater," she said. "I will miss his work at the paper."
Glory days
The Citizen, Arizona's oldest continually published newspaper, distinguished itself over many decades — with everything from colorful reportage of the 1881 shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone to in-depth coverage of virtually every major political and social issue of the times.
Its fortunes waxed and waned from time to time, with one heyday occurring in the 1960s when circulation reached about 60,000 compared with its final circulation of less than 20,000.
The paper displayed a powerful editorial voice — sometimes as cheerleader, sometimes as nemesis — and served as a training ground for journalists who went on to outstanding careers in major cities around the nation.
Here are reflections from several people who saw the paper shine:
• Mike Chihak
Chihak, who left the Citizen last year after serving as its top executive for about eight years, said the paper excelled at local news coverage — partly because "the key decision-makers were often people who had lived in Tucson since a very young age."
"These were people who not only knew their way up and down the block in Tucson, but up and down the alleys as well."
Chihak, who is now executive director of the nonprofit Communications Leadership Institute in San Francisco, has a rich family and personal history with the Citizen.
"My grandfather was a Citizen pressman before I was born," he said. "I delivered the Citizen as a kid . . . my college internship was at the Citizen, and I was hired full-time at the end of the summer of 1970."
He later went to work for The Associated Press, served another stint on the Citizen's staff as reporter and editor before taking a job with USA Today, and returned to Tucson to become editor and publisher of the Citizen in 2000.
The paper's various "glory days" over the years were a reflection of the fact that "we were blessed with really good writers," Chihak says.
He reels off the names of some of the writers in his own era who helped make the Citizen "sing" — including Larry Cheek, Dick Vonier and Charles Bowden, as well as staff writers Anne Denogean, Chuck Graham, Gabrielle Fimbres, Anthony Gimino, and Polly Higgins.
• Lee Oler
"The Citizen has personality," said Lee Oler, a Tucsonan who is active in environmental causes through the Sierra Club. "The Citizen writers are accessible. The Citizen conveys a sense of community, almost like family."
Oler cites several writers and editors whose work touched her or impressed her with its excellence.
"I particularly remember an article about the stranded animals after Hurricane Katrina that Billie Stanton wrote," Oler noted in an e-mail message. "It brought tears to my eyes."
• Diane Luber
Luber, the city editor of the Citizen, recalled her years at the paper as the best of her career.
"Even before I joined the Citizen in 2004, I thought of it as a newspaper full of heart and spunk," Luber said. "Its roots always seemed to be deep in the Tucson community. I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to work with such a diverse, dedicated and passionate group of people. It has been the high point of my 25-year career in newspapers.
"We've told many good stories about good people, exposed wrongdoing and tried to show Tucson something about itself every day that it might not have otherwise known," Luber said. "One paper will never be able to serve the community as well as two did."
• Edward Humes
Humes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of narrative non-fiction and true crime books, worked as a reporter at the Citizen from 1981 to 1985.
He recalled that "the paper had amassed some amazing talent, reporters and editors alike, who had a passion for good journalism and who delighted in being the underdog in a two-newspaper town — because it really meant something when we beat the competition."
Humes described his years at the Citizen as "some of the most joyful times in my journalism career."
"I spent four years at the Tucson Citizen, underpaid, overworked, regularly awakened by telephone assaults from the most foul-mouthed city editor in the business, and forced to compete one against two with the Star," he said. "And I wouldn't have missed a minute of it ... This is where I learned to report, to write, to dig, and I'll carry those lessons with me always."
Hard times
The decline and fall of the Citizen has been long — and painful for those who worked at the paper and those who loved to read it.
Circulation dropped steadily in recent years. Partly, this was a result of a widespread withering among afternoon newspapers in a nation of ever-more-busy people — many of whom seemed to want their news briefing first thing in the morning rather than in a leisurely afternoon sitting.
Then came competition from Internet news sources and, more recently, the severe economic downturn that robbed newspapers of advertisers and subscribers.
In the end, Gannett, owner of the Citizen, decided it no longer was a viable enterprise.
• Donald W. Carson
Carson, a Tucson author and professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Arizona, said he believes that "the Citizen's death was caused by its publication cycle (as an afternoon paper), the Internet and greed."
By greed, Carson said, he means that large media corporations have demanded that newspapers return profits that are unrealistically high.
He called the closure of the Citizen "tragic," and he maintained that the Internet on its own would be no substitute for the coverage provided by newspapers.
"Most Americans do not understand the flow of the news," Carson said. "It all begins with the daily and, sometimes, weekly newspapers. ... If newspapers everywhere closed, we would have nothing but total babble on the Internet."
Weather poems
For many years, the Citizen informed and entertained readers with a daily front page "weather poem" — a lighthearted riff of verse that introduced the day's weather summary.
Here's one from Oct. 15, 1970, when the paper celebrated the 100th anniversary of its founding:
Rest assured,
It shan't thundereth
On our birthday,
Today's our 100th.
— Annie Versary