The San Gabriel Valley Tribune is a digital and print news media company based in Monrovia, California. Its coverage area includes the San Gabriel Valley, including the communities of Arcadia, Azusa, Baldwin Park, Covina, Diamond Bar, Duarte, El Monte, Glendora, Hacienda Heights, La Verne, Monterey Park, Monrovia, Montebello, Rosemead, Rowland Heights, San Dimas, South El Monte, Temple City, Walnut and West Covina.
The Tribune is part of Southern California News Group, which operates 11 daily newspapers and associated websites in Southern California, including the Los Angeles Daily News, Daily Breeze in Torrance, Long Beach Press-Telegram, The (Riverside) Press-Enterprise, Pasadena Star-News, Whittier Daily News, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, The Sun in San Bernardino and Redlands Facts. When combined with its multiple weekly newspapers, Spanish-language products and social media channels, SCNG products reach an audience of more than 8 million readers each week, with in-depth reporting on exclusive content focusing on local news, politics, sports and entertainment relevant to the communities it serves.
The Tribune is best known for its coverage of local news. The Tribune publishes around the clock at sgvtribunes.com and also publishes daily print newspapers seven days a week. Over the past decade, the Tribune has increasingly prioritized the delivery of news on digital platforms. The Tribune is also active on Facebook and Twitter.
The San Gabriel Valley Tribune was first published 60 years ago, on the afternoon of March 21, 1955.
Before the Tribune, residents of the East San Gabriel Valley read local weeklies — the Covina Argus Citizen, the West Covina Tribune, the Baldwin Park Tribune, the El Monte Press.
Many said a regional newspaper would never work.
But founder Carl Miller had a vision. In 1947, he formed a partnership with his brother A.Q. Miller and Corwin Hoffland to run their weeklies and then began making plans to create a daily.
“Carl had absolutely no doubt that the Tribune would succeed,” Howard Seelye, the paper’s managing editor from 1957 to 1960, said in a story commemorating the paper’s 50th anniversary. “He had researched the area thoroughly, had seen the development that had already taken place and all the projects that were on the books waiting to go and jumped in wholeheartedly.”
He was right.
When the paper was founded, the San Gabriel Valley was just a sleepy suburb of Los Angeles, where ranches and farms shared the landscape with subdivisions. But those subdivisions were growing fast and new ones popped up weekly, alongside new businesses and industries.
The region’s isolation decreased dramatically with the completion of the 10 Freeway in 1955 and, a few years later, the completion of the Eastland Shopping Center in West Covina — the region’s first big mall. A story in Time magazine proclaimed the area along the freeway the fastest growing place in the nation.
As the area grew, so did the Tribune.
Paid circulation started at about 15,000 and took off in the late 1950s, hitting 44,000 by 1960 and reaching 90,000 by 1965, just 10 years after launching. Reporters were hired, a street edition was launched, a second wire service was added. The editorial department grew from 12 to 50.
The growing population wanted local control, and cities incorporated throughout the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s — with the Tribune there to cover those battles.
Other big stories helped boost the Tribune’s readers and reputation. The first came in 1959, when a West Covina doctor went on trial for killing his wife in a headline-grabbing love triangle involving his pretty nurse that attracted national attention.
In 1962, a series of stories uncovering municipal corruption in Irwindale won a prestigious national Sigma Delta Chi award for community service and a nod from the Pulitzer Prize committee.
And during the late ’70s and early ’80s, the Tribune received attention and accolades for its environmental coverage, particularly of groundwater contamination throughout the San Gabriel Valley as a result of the aerospace industry.
In recent years the Tribune has focused on government and public-agency accountability, or watchdog, reporting as well as digital audience growth. In an ongoing series the Tribune has reported on the City of Industry in an effort to hold city officials accountable for flagrant spending and corruption.
The San Gabriel Valley Tribune spent more than 30 years in its West Covina location on Azusa Canyon Road. The building housed the printing presses and there were train tracks that led to the building’s loading docks where newspapers were once distributed to the east.
After a careful search process, a lease was finalized in August, 2015 for the San Gabriel Valley Tribune’s new location which is on the ground floor at 605 E. Huntington Drive, Suite 100 in Monrovia.
