Manteca Bulletin

The Bulletin is a community newspaper and places a heavy emphasis on local news. Like many community newspapers, the Bulletin does not report national or wire service news on its front page. However, the Bulletin will often localize national news if the story has a local impact, or to get local perspective. Non-local news is typically relegated to the inside pages and is often limited in scope.

To promote a large-scale water project that was the forerunner to today's South San Joaquin Irrigation District, two men - F.L. Wurster and A.L. Cowell - joined forces to print the Irrigation Bulletin in November 1908. Originally printed in Stockton, California, the Bulletin was essentially a series of flyers distributed statewide promoting the irrigation of 70,000 acres (280 km²) of sandy loam soil around Manteca.[2]

With the help of the South San Joaquin Chamber of Commerce, the Bulletin expanded into a standard-size weekly newspaper on June 3, 1910, when it was moved from Stockton to Ripon. The paper continued to promote the South San Joaquin Irrigation District, which was founded in 1909, and carried news of the district's bond sales to investors throughout California.[2]

Water began flowing in 1915 and the South County's population boomed. Several newspapers arose to serve this community, among them the Escalon Times, Lathrop Sun and Ripon Record. The Bulletin changed its name to the Manteca Bulletin on November 6, 1914, and merged on March 22, 1918, with the Manteca Enterprise, which had been founded November 1, 1911.[2]

In 1923, George Murphy Sr. partnered with Louis Meyer to purchase the Manteca Bulletin. This began 50 years of ownership by the Murphy family; on April 1, 1972, when George Murphy Jr. sold the Bulletin to Charles Morris and his family-owned Morris Multimedia.[2] Morris sold its California division to 209 Multimedia in 2020.[3]

In response to an outcry over plagiarism in the newspaper's opinion pages, the Bulletin published an editorial acknowledging the problem in 2009.[4]

The newspaper's editorials are characterized by a conservative stance on immigration and social issues. For example, Managing Editor Dennis Wyatt wrote that if immigrants "preferred their lives in whatever country they heralded where they weren't required to speak English to communicate in a business, in school, on a job or with the government then perhaps they should have thought twice about coming to the United States."[5]

The paper competes locally with the Modesto Bee and The Record. Other publications available in the area include the San Francisco Chronicle, East Bay Times, New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and the Barrons.

209 Multimedia also publishes 209 Magazine, a bimonthly regional magazine, the semiweekly Turlock Journal, and the weeklies the Ceres Courier, the Escalon Times, the Gustine Press Standard, the Oakdale Leader, the Riverbank News, and the West Side Index of Newman.

• Manteca Bulletin Online