The following Signal editorial appeared in the debut print edition of the new Sunday Signal news magazine:
It’s been nearly 100 years. In February, The Signal — our friends call it The Mighty Signal — will hit the century mark.
It has been an interesting journey for this community news organization, which started as a weekly publication serving a small town of just 500 souls. There were more cattle here than people at the time.
As we celebrate that centennial anniversary next year, we’ll revisit a lot of the history of the community, and the journey that the upstart weekly took starting in 1919 on its way to being a full-fledged daily news operation with the most robust website in the Santa Clarita Valley.
But today, we celebrate a milestone in Year 99: It’s Sunday, and you’re once again holding a Sunday Signal in your hands.
If you’re a newcomer who’s not familiar with The Signal, may we introduce ourselves: From its humble small-town beginnings, the Santa Clarita Valley’s community newspaper grew as the community grew.
First it became a twice-weekly, then a thrice-weekly. By 1989, Santa Clarita had become a thriving city with a population over 100,000 and The Signal was a full-fledged daily newspaper.
Through it all, the paper went through several major ownership changes. The Trueblood family owned it for many years, then the rambunctious newspapering duo of Scott and Ruth Newhall. For most of the ‘80s, ‘90s and early-2000s, it was owned by a corporation based in Georgia.
A few years ago, it was brought back under local ownership.
And, we’re proud to say, last month, it finally became a family-owned newspaper again.
We’re excited to bring that notion of an extended family back to your community’s newspaper. The Signal’s owners and editors live here, we’ve raised families here, and we all care deeply about the best interests of this community.
Like many other news organizations that originated as print products, The Signal has encountered its bumps in the road with the advent of the digital age. It’s done some things really well — check out our website, signalscv.com, for evidence of that.
And, there have been experiments on the print side. One of them was the elimination of the Sunday paper, which a few years ago was combined with the Saturday edition.
That experiment ends today, with the debut of the new, re-imagined Sunday Signal.
You’ll notice that it’s formatted a bit differently than our weekday broadsheet newspaper, and that’s because the Sunday read is different. The new Sunday Signal is presented as a news magazine, with in-depth features, and useful and fun information geared toward the casual Sunday read, in a package that can stay on the coffee table for the ensuing week.
We’re distributing the Sunday Signal for free, to 70,000 Santa Clarita Valley households. We’re proud to be back on Sundays, we’re proud of The Mighty Signal, and we welcome your feedback.
So please, relax. It’s Sunday. Enjoy the read.
