Paper drops Monday, Tuesday editions

In Eureka, California -- a city of 26,000 on the Pacific Coast some 275 miles north of San Francisco -- the town's free daily has announced it will no longer publish print editions on Mondays and Tuesdays in the new year.

The death of the two editions is perhaps the first casualty in an intense battle between the town's two dailies:

• The Eureka Times-Standard, which is paid, 153-years-old (that's old by California standards) and owned by a national chain, MediaNews Group of Denver, Colorado, headed by Dean Singleton.

• The Eureka Reporter. which is free, almost 2 years old and owned by local millionaire Rob Arkley Jr. Arkley, who owns several local businesses including a bank, started the Reporter because he felt there wasn't enough local news in the Times-Standard.

Here's a link to a 2006 San Francisco Chronicle story that describes the newspaper war in detail.