Why San Diego needs a Chronicle
A new daily record for America's eighth-largest city.
SAN DIEGO: San Diego is the eighth-largest city in the United States, home to about 1.4 million people, with more than 3.3 million residents across the metropolitan area. It is a Navy town and a biotech town, a border town and a beach town, a city that builds trolley lines and sequences genomes. It deserves a daily record as serious as the place itself. That is what this publication intends to be.
The Chronicle will cover San Diego as one region, not a collection of beats that happen to share a coastline. Civic Life follows City Hall, the budget, housing and homelessness. The Border covers the crossings, the wait times and the wall. The Military covers the bases and the fleets. Science covers Illumina, UC San Diego and the research mesa. The Coast covers the bluffs, the surf and the sewage crisis in the Tijuana River. Culture covers Comic-Con, San Diego FC and everything in between. Opinion, this page, is where we argue about all of it.
We start from a simple premise: this is a binational region. More than 130,000 legal crossings are recorded at the California-Baja California ports on a typical day, over 47 million a year, according to SANDAG's 2024 border data. No honest account of San Diego's economy, its culture or its future can treat the border as someone else's story. It is the region's front door, and we will cover it like one.
It deserves a daily record as serious as the place itself.
A few promises about how we will work. News and opinion will be kept strictly separate, and labeled as what they are. We will correct errors promptly and visibly. We will not invent quotes, statistics, biographies or scenes; if we did not verify it, we will not print it. We will show up, read the agendas, and write it down.
This is a launch, not a victory lap. A paper earns its readers one accurate story at a time, and we intend to earn them. If you live here, work here, cross here or serve here, this Chronicle is yours. Hold us to it.
None to date. The Tribune corrects errors promptly and transparently. Read our corrections policy.
