Legendary Editor Shuts Newspaper
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The Santa Clarita Valley Citizen, the maverick newspaper launched last September by a family of top editors who resigned from the Newhall Signal, ceased publication Wednesday, apparently ending the career of newspaper legend Scott Newhall.
A front-page editorial announced that Wednesday’s edition would be the paper’s last.
“This is a difficult, most painful decision,” wrote Scott Newhall and his wife, Ruth, the citizen’s editor. The paper, launched Sept. 11, could not attract sufficient advertising or subscribers to remain solvent, they said. The paper printed 43,000 copies but had only 1,000 paying subscribers.
Newhall, 75, patriarch of the influential Newhall family, had guided the Signal for 25 years before abruptly resigning, along with his wife and son, in a stock dispute with the Signal’s owner last August.
He had gained a nationwide reputation for irreverence as editor of the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1950s and for his bombastic editorials in the Signal.
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