The Sacramento Bee: A 19th Century Brand Name Still Generating Buzz

We love it when a brand name sticks like honey—when it demonstrates true staying power and a loyal audience. There’s one such sticky brand name in Zinzin’s Northern California backyard. It’s a newspaper founded in 1857 called The Sacramento Bee. And it has a fascinating history with a great naming story to tell.

Today, The Sacramento Bee (The Bee) is the flagship of The McClatchy Company (McClatchy), the second largest newspaper publisher in the United States. However, The Bee took flight 168 years ago today. (For context, that’s two years after the end of the Gold Rush and four years prior to the start of the Civil War.) In fact, these words appear in the paper’s first edition:

The object of this newspaper is not only independence, but permanence.

Little did they know this brilliant bit of brand positioning, as it’s now considered, laid the foundation for their Bee brand name to stick.

Why is It Called The Bee?

This is the question posed by The Bee itself. And here’s how their story begins:

(Excerpted from The Sacramento Bee’s Ombudsman column on March 24, 1991)

Glad you asked. It’s been that since 1857 when James McClatchy founded the paper. An editorial on the first day of publication said: “The name of The Bee has been adopted as being different from that of any other paper in the state and as also being emblematic of the industry which is to prevail in its every department.”

So, the promise was a paper as busy as a bee. (Quaint, but not a bad marketing strategy, I should think.)

The first James McClatchy used a picture of a bee on his business stationery. His son, C.K., ordered the image of a bee depicted in mosaic tile in the lobby of the old Bee office at 911 Seventh St. in 1901. That mosaic now is on permanent display at the Sacramento History Museum.

A Name that Stands Out from the Crowd

In Zinzin’s experience and observations, so many founders today looking for a new brand name have FOSO, or fear of standing out. However, James McClatchy did not. In 1857, he intuitively understood the importance of a name and that stands out from the (state newspaper) crowd. And even in that era, it was quite a crowd.

Before 1860, California had 57 newspapers and periodicals serving an average readership of 290,000. (Source: Wikipedia.) In large part, this was due to the The California Gold Rush (1848-1855).

Here are a handful of California newspapers in circulation before The Sacramento Bee:

• 1846 The Californian
• 1848 The California Star (merged with The Californian to become Alta California)
• 1849 Placer Times
• 1850 Sonora Herald
• 1851 San Jose Mercury
• 1851 San Jose Weekly Visitor
• 1851 La Estrella de Los Angeles (The Los Angeles Star)
• 1851 The San Diego Herald
• 1851 Mountain Democrat
• 1852 Mountain Messenger
• 1854 Southern Californian
• 1854 Eureka Times-Standard
• 1855 El Clamor Publico 
• 1855 Daily Evening Bulletin

In the context of the names above, the name The Sacramento Bee perfectly illustrates tenet #15 of Zinzin’s Branding Manifesto: When naming, it never works to act out of fear.

Enter Walt Disney & Scoopy

The fascinating history of The Bee doesn’t end in 1857 with its name. It continues decades later with the founder’s granddaughter who forged a famous collaboration with Walt Disney. This partnership between The Bee and Walt Disney continued to strengthen its brand identity and connection to its community.

(story continued from excerpt above)

In 1943 James McClatchy’s granddaughter, Eleanor, then president of The Bee, asked Walt Disney to create some new images of the insect to “lend personality and a familiar identity” to the papers and the company’s radio stations.

Disney, who donated his $1,500 fee to the Army Relief Fund, came up with “Scoopy” for the papers and “Gaby” for the radio stations. The new logos were announced with great front-page fanfare in The Bee on Sept. 4. That evening, a 15-minute radio interview with Disney from Hollywood was broadcast on KFBK. Eventually, Scoopy drawings were created for all sorts of Bee promotions and events, and the fellow became ubiquitous around the paper.

Scoopy is the only Disney-created character allowed to “work” outside of the Walt Disney Company, and still lives today throughout the pages of The Bee. He can be seen at events throughout the community, greeting children of all ages.

And Now Back to the Topic of Naming a Newspaper

While The Bee focused on a name “different from that of any other paper in the state,” consider the bigger newspaper naming picture across the country at the time. It was still a revolutionary name compared to many newspapers before and after its founding that followed a more descriptive naming path.

Picayune (The Times-Picayune, New Orleans)

In the 19th-century American South, a picayune was a coin with a low monetary value. The word derives from picaioun, which means “small coin” in Occitan (a language spoken in Southern France). The Occitan word pica means “to jingle” and was created to mimic the sound of coins jingling. Originally published as The Picayune in 1837, the New Orleans paper was named for the price for which an issue was sold—about six and a quarter cents. Picayune can additionally mean “petty or trifling,” as in “picayune complaints.”

Intelligencer (The Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

An intelligencer can be a newspaper or news reporter. Originally, however, the word referred to someone who worked gathering field intelligence of a confidential sort—that is, a spy:

Up to this time, so our intelligencers reported, there had been many projects of invasion put forward, but all had been rejected.  —Sir Julian Stafford Corbett, England in the Seven Years’ War, 1907

Both the “reporter” and “spy” senses date to the 16th century. The word’s use in newspapers dates almost as far back as well.

Tribune (The Chicago Tribune, The Salt Lake Tribune)

In ancient Rome, tribune referred to any number of elected officials. In effect, their job was to protect the citizens by providing a check on the authority of the senators. “In this character, and with the consent of the Roman, the tribune enacted the most salutary laws for the restoration and maintenance of the good estate,” wrote Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

A close modern analogue to the Roman tribune is the ombudsman, who receives and investigates complaints made by individuals against the wrongdoing of public officials. Another sense of tribune refers to a dais or platform from which an assembly is addressed.

Herald (The Miami Herald, The Omaha World-Herald)

Many newspaper names hark back to the days of town criers and public messengers calling out the news of the day in public arenas. That’s the case of herald, which in medieval times referred to the official that called out announcements at jousting tournaments. Similar words that describe the same kinds of duties include messenger (as in The Messenger of Fort Dodge, Iowa) and courier (as in The Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina). Even the name Mercury (in such papers as The Portland Mercury and The Mercury News of San Jose) fits in this category, since Mercury was the messenger of the Gods in Roman mythology.

Sentinel (The Orlando Sentinel, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

A sentinel is a guard or watchman, or it can describe a military watchtower. It is one of a number of words that, when used in the name of a newspaper, tie the work of a journalist with that of one keeping watchful eye on the events in a vicinity. Observer (as in the Charlotte Observer) and examiner (as in the San Francisco Examiner) are similarly named. Sentinel derives via Middle French and Old Italian from the Latin sentire, meaning “to perceive.”

Gazette (The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)

The original Gazettes were a series of bulletins published in England in the 17th and early 18th centuries. These official journals contained notices of government appointments and promotions, as well as items like bankruptcies, property transfers, and engagements. The word derives via French from Italian gazetta, so called because in 16th and 17th-century Venice, such a periodical could be bought for a small copper coin called a gazzetta.

Standard (The Post-Standard, Syracuse, New York)

Standard has many senses in English, but the applicable one here refers to a flag—originally, one bearing heraldic devices (as may be carried by a standard-bearer). Banner gets similar treatment in names such as the Athens Banner-Herald (Athens, Ga.).

Dispatch (The St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

To dispatch to send another away to do something, as in the case of ambulances or police officers. Additionally, a dispatch is a message sent off quickly. In military and governmental contexts, it refers specifically to a message sent in cipher, and later to a news item delivered from the field to a newspaper or news agency. This sense reinforces the notion of reporters as correspondents delivering updates back to the home base.

Chronicle (The San Francisco Chronicle)

Appearing in a number of literary titles (e.g., The Chronicles of Narnia; The Heidi Chronicles), chronicle, from the Greek chronika, literally refers to an account of historical events presented in the order they happened. Nowadays it is used more generally to mean “narrative.”

[Source: Merriam-Webster, Arts & Culture]

Parting Thoughts

I love the name The Sacramento Bee. It dared to step outside of the newspaper-naming box. They embraced the power of an evocative name, which Zinzin encourages our clients to do in our own naming work.

It’s also cool that they hired Walt Disney himself to design their mascots, the only non-Disney (the company) advertising characters he created. These are the four mascots Walt Disney created for The Bee: Scoopy (newspaper), Gaby (radio), Flutey (FM radio), Teevy (TV).

In the words of Zinzin’s founder and creative director, “Imagine what Walt Disney would have come up with had he lived longer?”

• Pooty (computer message boards)
• Netty (Internet)
• Queasy (social media)

If you want to blend in with the competition and go unnoticed by the public at large, that’s easy to achieve. But if you position your company as bold, adventurous, and revolutionary, yet you’re afraid to adopt a name that supports such a bold position, then your brand is in trouble. The public will see through your attempts to be “bold” if you lead with a weak name.

So, draw inspiration from The Bee, and let your name be as powerful as your vision.

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Bonus: Here’s an interesting article on the history of the symbolism of bees by Architectural Digest: Gucci Gave Them Buzz, but Bees Have Been a Design Motif for Millennia.