This was the Russo-Japanese War of newspaper collisions. Little-noted beyond the immediate participants, but messy and decisive, all the same, concluding with one side crippled and the other enormously stronger and recognized as a major regional player for the first time.

The Russo-Japanese War began in 1904 and ended with Russia humiliated and on its way to collapse, and with Japan newly confident and on a path to world-power status.

The San Bernardino Sun-Riverside Press Enterprise war began in, let’s say, 1997, and ended a decade later with The Sun a wrecked newspaper clinging to existence, economically shattered, with a fraction of the penetration it enjoyed when hostilities began … and with the Press Enterprise the clear victor — a victor that now stands as the journalism colossus of the fast-growing Inland Empire.

I was witness to most of this newspaper war and, eventually, a casualty of it in what could be construed as its final skirmish. I was a manager and columnist at The Sun for the duration of the struggle, which (it turns out) was like being in St. Petersburg in 1904-05 with the Czar and his ministers, trying to figure out how we could have been so easily destroyed inside our own borders.

The Sun-PE War didn’t have the cachet of other classic newspaper wars, such as the L.A. Times vs. the Herald-Examiner or the Dallas Morning News vs. the Dallas Times-Herald. The journalistic entities were smaller, and their “backwater” Inland Empire location practically guaranteed no one important would notice.

But at the end, the dominant newspaper of one enormous California county had invaded the dominant newspaper of the adjoining enormous county. And defeated it. Taken away its readers. The Daniel Day-Lewis line from “There Will Be Blood” comes to mind. The one about “I drink your milk shake!” That is what the PE did to The Sun. It drank its milk shake.

First, some background. A look back at the long antebellum period.

The Sun and Press Enterprise, or at least the publishing enterprises attached to various mastheads of their lineal forebears, had been the dominant media in the Inland Empire for more than a century.

San Bernardino was the seat of a county of the same name. Riverside, same deal.

Each city’s hometown newspaper had little or no competition. If/when the Los Angeles Times took notice of a pair of cities some 60 and 50 miles from downtown L.A., it succeeded only in becoming the distant Second Buy in each area. The Sun and Press Enterprise were kings inside their own castles.

The regions had much in common, originally (Riverside County was, in fact, part of San Bernardino County from 1853-93), but their paths soon diverged.

San Bernardino became the blue-collar bastion, its politics strongly oriented toward the Democratic party and its economy based on communications (the Santa Fe and Union Pacific railroads), gas stations, dive bars, cheap motels and vice.

Riverside was the city with pretensions (and Republican politics), founded and shaped by gentlemen citrus growers (the navel orange was created there) with lofty visions of the future and antipathy toward a red-light district within walking distance of city hall.

San Bernardino was the gin-soaked dive where platinum-blonde actress Jean Harlow spent a Lost Weekend in the 1930s with a businessman in a seedy hotel. Riverside was where they built the ornate Mission Inn and had President Taft stay as a guest and hosted Richard Nixon’s wedding.

Riverside got a UC campus in 1959. San Bernardino got a Cal State campus, in 1965.

But those innate cultural chasms didn’t impact the newspapers much for a very long time. There was, in fact, a gentleman’s agreement, perhaps never even verbalized, that The Sun would peddle its product only on its (northern) side of the long county line, and the Press Enterprise would stay on its side.

It led to some odd circulation patterns that anti-trust lawyers might have found interesting, had they bothered to look. The Sun could sell 2,000 papers a day in Barstow, 70 miles away, but not 200 papers in Riverside, 10 miles away. The PE sold thousands of papers in Palm Springs, 60 miles distant, but it didn’t offer home delivery in San Bernardino, minutes away by car.

Both newspapers viewed the world through “county” prisms. How much rain fell, how students tested, economic growth — all viewed through that hometown lens — even when “hometown” stretched to the Nevada border, in San Bernardino’s case, and to the Arizona border, in Riverside’s. Both papers hammered home the distinctiveness of their base, even when explosive growth throughout the region rendered those distinctions less coherent or relevant.

Which was the better newspaper was open to debate over the first half of the 20th century. The Sun sold more papers for much of that time because it was based in the larger city. But it was nothing special, and neither was the Press Enterprise. Influential, yes, even when TV entered the picture — because the IE had no local TV, to speak of (and limited access to L.A. stations, before the advent of cable). But both papers were fairly small and seriously parochial.

That began to change. The PE was the first to wake up to the outside world. It won a Pulitzer in 1968 for meritorious service on an expose of conditions at an American-Indian reservation near Palm Springs. Meanwhile, The Sun was the first to take the money and run.

The Guthrie family, which had operated the newspaper for decades (while throwing nickels around like manhole covers), sold to corporate outsiders. The first buyer was the L.A. Times, but the feds forced Times Mirror to divest itself of The Sun because it was an anti-competitive sale. (Imagine that happening in modern times.)

Instead, The Sun went to (then) New York-based Gannett Co. Inc. Thus, The Sun was in corporate hands by 1970, almost three full decades before the PE was. In Riverside, the Hays family continued to run the PE until 1997, when it sold to the Dallas-based Belo chain.

Early on, Gannett’s purchase of The Sun probably helped the newspaper. Gannett wanted its 25 percent profit (and up), but it imposed basic standards of competence (and salary) the Guthries seemed slow to embrace. But on a practical level, the bonds between The Sun (and its distant owners) and its readership were weakened. Ownership’s commitment to the market was now practical and impersonal, not gut-level and personal.

Those distinctions were to prove important when crunch time came.

Crunch time came in 1997, when the Hays family ended its long run as Riverside publishing kings by selling the PE to Dallas-based Belo. This turned out to be very bad news for The Sun because the Hays people had clung to the old gentleman’s agreement/non-aggression pact — even when those weren’t gentlemen in San Bernardino, since 1970, they were Gannett operatives.

Belo surveyed the scene, decided The Sun was vulnerable, and went over to the attack.

It was a war The Sun was ill-prepared to fight because chains hate competition. It costs money. It cuts into profits. Gannett prefers non-competitive markets, and San Bernardino had been one.

An era of free money from San Bernardino was about to end, and Gannett was to demonstrate little stomach for a war with Belo. (And Dean Singleton was to show even less.)

The first PE targets were communities just across the county-line frontier — Colton, Redlands, Rialto, Yucaipa, Bloomington and, yes, San Bernardino — the heart of Sun country.Joe Happ, a managing editor at the Press Enterprise at the time, said the intent wasn’t to destroy The Sun. Wrote Happ, in an e-mail. “The P-E’s foray into Berdoo was based on nothing more sophisticated than the old newspaper truism ‘Grow or die.’ We needed to build circulation to offset losses elsewhere and Berdoo was the logical target. Nobody had any illusions about taking down The Sun because we all knew such things weren’t really possible.”

The War was on.

The PE made several hostile gestures that proved to be inspired.

1. It inaugurated a San Bernardino County edition and planted a significant news bureau just miles from San Bernardino city hall. The journalists there almost immediately were churning out as much San Bernardino news as were their competitors at The Sun. As time went on, they produced more news and The Sun less.

2. The PE pillaged The Sun newsroom, hiring away many of The Sun’s top reporters and editors. A significant number of the IE’s veteran journalists took their San Bernardino county and city contacts (and institutional memory) and shifted them to the PE side of the ledger. The names Cassie MacDuff, Rich Brooks, Jan Sears and Maria DeVarenne, later to becomes editor of the PE, come to mind.

3. The PE drastically discounted home delivery prices for neighborhoods in Sun-dominated areas. A reader could get a year of the PE, home-delivered, for $20. Basically, free. But the PE/Belo was in this for the long run, and it was willing to pay to buy circulation. The sort of foresight and commitment uncommon in modern print journalism.

4. The PE reoriented its news coverage. From “Riverside County” to the two-county concept of “Inland Empire.” The word “Riverside” disappeared off its mast. It became, ingeniously, geographically nebulous. Apparently not tied to any single IE community, but seemingly interested in them all.

Some subscribers in Riverside were annoyed by the PE’s constant references to this greater geographical area (“what is Redlands news doing in my Riverside newspaper!?”), but it eventually created in the minds of readers the idea that they were part of this larger entity the PE served, and not just the San Bernardino County entity that The Sun continued to stress.

But the PE invasion wasn’t simply a matter of a brilliant business plan. It was aided by demographics, the sale of The Sun to MediaNews, unstable Sun leadership, inconsistent Sun resistance and economic trends. And demographics. Did I mention that?

1. The PE arrived in force in Sun country at the very moment when The Sun’s core-market demographics were collapsing. Income, education, native English-speakers in the house … all fell dramatically beginning in the mid-1990s, especially after the closure of Norton Air Force Base, a backbone of the San Bernardino economy.

The Sun had fewer economic resources at hand. The PE could discount to, essentially, nothing its home delivery because it was charging full freight in its original core market. The Sun could not respond because its core market was under attack; it couldn’t match $20 annual subscriptions and still make the 25 percent profit Gannett expected from its “operating units.”

2. The Dean Singleton/MediaNews takeover, in 1999, brought in ownership significantly less interested in journalistic competence than was Gannett. And even less willing to put up a fight. If Gannett shied from the full-contact of a newspaper war, MediaNews ran from it.

(Interestingly, when the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, Donrey’s suburban daily west of San Bernardino, was for sale a year or two earlier, Gannett attempted to buy it, but Singleton’s MediaNews won out. Had Gannett purchased the Bulletin, creating a San Bernardino County powerhouse with a combined circulation of some 160,000, Gannett might still be in San Bernardino and almost certainly would have offered more resistance to the PE than Singleton put up. Instead, not getting Ontario meant Gannett bailing out on San Bernardino became a matter of “when” not “if.”)

The MediaNews purchase also had the effect of stripping The Sun of another key cadre of talented newsroom employees, scared stiff by the prospect of working for Dean Singleton. Many of those who fled went to the PE, further reinforcing the invader. And The Sun responded by hiring kids, on the cheap, who were hard-pressed to compete with the PE’s San Bernardino-trained, Berdoo-savvy hands.

3. Unstable Sun leadership played a part. The newspaper was still Gannett-owned when the PE incursion went hot. I recall editor Ricardo Pimentel boasting that The Sun would “throw them back into Riverside County, where they belong.” But Pimentel was a lame duck by the spring of 1999, when MediaNews bought The Sun from Gannett. In September of that year, he was forced out as part of a purge of all things Gannett.

A parade of editors ensued, at a critical moment in the war. Gerald Garcia and Joe Happ (yes, the same man who had played a big part in the PE’s invasion plan) and then Steve Lambert, in 2002. Four editors in four years. New faces the community didn’t know, sent out to Sun communities to insist they were the “hometown” guys. Even though they had just arrived.

The Sun went through a batch of publishers then, too. I don’t even remember their names. (If someone wants to help me with the publisher line of succession, feel free, and I’ll insert.) At least five publishers between 1998, when Brooks Johnson lost favor inside Gannett and was ousted, until 2004, when Bob Balzer took over.

One publisher was The Guy Choppered Off the Roof by Gannett the day MediaNews took over, in September, 1999. One of only three employees Gannett pulled out of Berdoo before the handover. (He went to Hawaii and was Gannett’s point man for its attempted closure of one of the two Honolulu dailies.) Then came the little guy I recall as “Mr. Low-Hanging Fruit.” He was convinced The Sun could grow quickly by showering attention on the High Desert, north of Cajon Pass, the Promised Land of the “low-hanging fruit” he often talked about. It was a ridiculous concept (and we all knew it) because, by then, the High Desert had its own local economy and local newspaper and little interest for a newspaper from “down the hill.” Plus, the “low-hanging fruit” initiative had the unfortunate side-effect of directing editorial resources away from the very really threat in The Sun’s home market. Then came (or was it before?) the perpetually tanned guy who loved to golf and had been a PE executive. Might even have been someone else in there, before Balzer.

The point being, Sun leadership was constantly churning while the paper was under attack. That led to shifting and inconsistent strategies, constant reorganizations, upheaval throughout other sinecures of upper management (including the editor’s chair) and, ultimately, ineffectual and effete resistance to the PE.

3. Economic trends all seemed to go in Riverside’s direction, too. It had enormous growth, and much of it was inside its historic core market. San Bernardino County also saw a population boom, but most of it was outside The Sun’s historic core, to the west toward Ontario or to the north, toward Hesperia and Victorville. And those tens of thousands of potential readers remained largely out of reach, oriented anywhere but toward the county seat, in San Bernardino.

Riverside also benefited by its close, 91 freeway connection to Orange County. I’m going to make a generalization and say that most of its newcomers in this decade came from the OC, and showed up with above-state-average money and education. Many of San Bernardino’s newcomers were refugees from south and east Los Angeles, driven out by high rents during the housing boom, people who arrived in San Bernardino County (via Interstate 10) with little more than the possessions they could load in a U-Haul — at a time when San Bernardino’s urban core was rotting out and businesses were fleeing.

4. Demographics. Again. Riverside’s core included far more people with above-average incomes, and the PE used them to leverage its push into San Bernardino. San Bernardino, meanwhile, was taking in poor people who not only didn’t benefit The Sun or make it more appealing to advertisers, they stultified growth, then helped reverse it.

By the middle of this decade, The Sun was in full retreat, hemorrhaging circulation (from a peak of 80,000-plus daily, 100,000 on Sunday), losing advertisers, fading in relevance. The PE may never have thought it would destroy The Sun, but it was getting close. And The Sun’s long contention, from management, that “the PE can’t give away its paper forever” had been shown to be a faulty premise. The PE could give it away long enough to make it the paper of record for BOTH sides of the county line. And did.

A reader of this blog sent along a recent publicity release trumpeting the PE’s circulation gains of the past year — at a time when everyone else is losing readers by the thousands.

Check out the PE’s circulation statistics here.

It continues to grow, and is now among the 60 biggest dailies in the country. The Sun, meanwhile, is under 60,000 daily, if what I’ve been told privately is correct, and still bleeding. Meaning the PE now outsells The Sun by a margin of 3-1, and pushing 4-1; it was less than 2-1 even a decade ago.

The PE’s daily product is now far heftier, devotes far more column inches to news and has many more ads. The Sun continues to shrink in size. First it gave up a stand-alone business section. Then, within the past year, it collapsed its “local” B section and shifted that news into the A section — which now is pathetically thin in its national and international coverage.

To the average IE newspaper reader, deciding which “local” newspaper to buy can’t be a hard decision. The big, fat, local-yet-wide-ranging Press Enterprise? Or the thin, resource-starved, error-riddled Sun?

The Sun vs. the PE … In my mind, it was a great journalism news story, for this reason:

It is rare to see an outside newspaper boldly enter the century-old home territory of another newspaper (of at least similar size and scope), crossing a governmental border (a county line) in the process … and take away its readership. But the Press Enterprise did, at the expense of The Sun.

Eventually, The Sun couldn’t afford luxuries like a veteran sports columnist, such as me. And fired him. Leaving readers to buy the PE and read its sports columnist, Gregg Patton, one of those former Sun staffers who jumped to the PE for a significant raise and a bigger audience.

The day I was fired, March 6, was when The War ended, for me. Sun management eagerly got rid of someone who had been there for 31-plus years and thought of little else but resisting the PE. Who had never once considered jumping to the competition because it would constitute (in my mind) an act of treason. But The Sun was now so weak, the only aggression it had become capable of showing was slashing its own budget.

Though organized resistance has ceased, a few stubborn Sun reporters continue to resist Riverside hegemony, carrying out guerrilla-style journalism inside the smokings ruins of their core market. They beat the PE on this or that story every day. John Murphy, in sports, not only routinely is ahead of the PE on San Bernardino-area high school coverage, he sometimes beats the PE on its own (Riverside) stories. (Why the PE hasn’t just hired him yet is a puzzlement.)

But this is another way we know the war is over, or at least well into the mop-up phase: The PE doesn’t really care anymore when it gets beaten on a San Bernardino story. I heard this from current PE staffers who say that whatever emphasis once was given to “beating” The Sun no longer is detectable. (They have turned their attention to fighting off the L.A. Times and Orange County Register, and shoring up their southern flank against the North County Times and its Temecula-based outlier, The Californian.)

The PE doesn’t have to be first, in San Bernardino. It is now the L.A. Times to The Sun’s fin de siecle Herald Examiner. In the Inland Empire, a story isn’t really news until the Press Enterprise reports it.

This is a bitter acknowledgment to make for someone whose entire professional career was given over to The Sun. But it is a matter of fact.

The IE newspaper war is over. San Bernardino lost. Riverside drank its milk shake.