Creative Commons/James Cridland

“It’s the first newspaper that I read every morning,” said Reid. “That paper has always been a paper that’s identified with Oakland. It saddens me that it’s going to be called the East Bay Tribune.”

The old-line newspaper industry has suffered mightily with the rise of the Internet. There are several news websites and blogs that cover Oakland today, including Oakland Local, Oakland North and the East Bay Express, which also has a weekly print edition.

But without the Oakland Tribune, there appears to be just one printed newspaper in Oakland that bears the name of the city on its masthead: the Oakland Post, a weekly African-American newspaper.

Post publisher Paul Cobb, who once worked as a Tribune columnist, said that when he was growing up in Oakland, one of his first jobs was delivering the Tribune.

“A newspaper is part of city's signature, it is part of its identity,” said Cobb. “It’s as if Oakland no longer has an advocate because we’ve become part of some amorphous regional paper.”

Oakland has always been a city full of interesting and important stories, from the social movements that started here such as the Black Panthers to the violence on the streets that persists today.

From 1915 to 1977, the powerful Knowland family owned the Tribune. In 1924, the Knowlands moved the paper's offices to what is now the Tribune Tower. During the 1960s, the Tribune’s conservative editorial stance began to seem out of step with the city it covered, and its readership declined.

Many consider the nine years from 1983 to 1992 the Tribune's golden era. That’s when the paper was run by Robert Maynard, an African-American and a newsroom veteran, who purchased the paper with a loan from Gannett Co., the media company. The Tribune won one of its two Pulitzer Prizes under Maynard's leadership for its photos of the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

“It was a newspaper that you had to read and people took pride in reading,” said Dori Maynard, Robert Maynard’s daughter, who now runs the Maynard Institute, a nonprofit that promotes diversity in journalism.

She said her father was harshly criticized for selling the paper in 1992 to BANG, a subsidiary of Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group. But she said that Singleton “kept it going for a long time."

“My father died knowing that Oakland had a newspaper and that was really important to him,” she said.

This story has been updated because language in the original version offended some readers; upon further analysis The Bay Citizen agreed that the passage should be removed.