After our Sunday paper -- and it's return to a Tacoma News Tribune flag -- reader Alex Griffin wrote the reader rep:

I have two questions. First, why doesn’t the News Tribune have Tacoma in its title? The paper is one of the city’s greatest advocates and it’s ridiculous for a newspaper not to have its city’s name in the title. Secondly, what would it take to get Tacoma put back in the News Tribune?

Here's my answer:

The decision to take Tacoma out of the name was made before my time, so I can’t answer why definitively. But I think it was the right choice and I can talk about that.

Like many papers in the last part of the 20th Century, the TNT was a paper that started in one central city, but – with suburbanization and sprawl – came to represent a much larger and more diverse area. It made sense to call it the Tacoma News Tribune when it served primarily Tacoma. Today Tacoma represents about 25 percent of our market and the same proportion of our circulation. So, for three-fourths of our readers, a Tacoma-centric paper isn’t what they’re looking for.

I believe that part of the reason for the change was that Bill Honeysett, the publisher at the time, recognized before most people that what had been the Tacoma area was becoming something much larger – the South Sound. It was distinct from the Seattle market, but also distinct from what had been though of as “greater Tacoma,” Tacoma, Fircrest, and the unincorporated communities that were growing up contiguous to Tacoma (Spanaway, Parkland, UP, Lakewood).

The paper’s new market stretched from South King County to North Thurston County, and out into exploding East Pierce County – Puyallup and South Hill, Bonney Lake, Graham, etc.

The paper’s choice was to stay Tacoma-centric and confine its ambitions and future to a smaller area, or to grow and expand as the population and residential geography of the area boomed. They made the right choice – to grow.

As did papers in Fort Lauderdale; Minneapolis; Santa Ana, Ca. (Orange County); Arlington Heights, Ill.; Newark and other rapidly growing metro areas, someone decided to drop the city from the paper's name to better identify with a larger, more diverse area whose identity and geographic boundaries were growing well beyond the old cities that were tightly grown around one urban center.

What it would take to change it is a publisher and company ownership that saw returning to the name Tacoma as both true geographically and advantageous from a business/marketing perspective. I don’t think either condition is likely.

Thanks for taking the time to write, and for the questions.