The Escondido Times-Advocate was created with a merger of the Escondido Times (started 1886) and the Escondido Advocate (1891), and was published from 1909-1995. The Escondido Times-Advocate then merged with the North County Blade-Citizen of Oceanside on December 3, 1995, and was subsequently known as the North County Times. In 2012, the North County Times was bought by The San Diego Union Tribune.

Dan Rios was one of six children born in the San Joaquin Valley town of Hanford, the son of a day laborer and a housekeeper, Theodore and Jennie Rios. The family moved to San Diego when Rios was thirteen, settling into a house near the Ocean Beach Pier. Rios dropped out of school in the eighth grade to work for a landscape maintenance company. Two years later, Rios started his own landscaping business that became so successful that he hired his father after the business had been open a year.

At the age of twenty-one, Rios went back to school to get his high school degree and then enrolled in Mesa College, studying civil engineering. As a class assignment, Rios was assigned to find a hobby to enjoy when he’d retire, and so he bought his first camera. Soon after, Rios enrolled in a photography class at City College, where, now 26, he found both his vocation and his avocation. He built a darkroom in his house and would buy film in 100 foot rolls. When Rios wasn’t shooting photography, he was developing it. He soon changed schools to City College and took up a new major: photography.

Starting with an advertising agency, Rios learned to shoot and develop color photos, a skill which helped him land a job with the Escondido Times-Advocate, which in 1968 was looking to hire a photographer that could help the paper transition from all black-and-white photography to color. Rios worked for the paper until his retirement in 2001 at the age of 60. During that time, Rios not only participated in the paper’s transition from black-and-white to color; he also saw the paper transition from an afternoon to a morning paper in 1990, managed the paper’s transition to digital photography in the 1990s, and witnessed the merger of the Time-Advocate with the North County Blade-Citizen in 1995, which created The North County Times.

In 2001 Dan and Theresa Rios were married; and together they parented 8 children. Dan Rios passed away September 6, 2023.

During Rios’s time as Chief Photographer for the Escondido Times-Advocate and The North County Times, he had over nine-thousand of his images published in the newspapers. Rios photographed an average of over 4 assignments per day over his thirty-three year career. In addition to his news assignments, Rios and the paper’s other photographers were encouraged to create “grab art,” traveling the area and photographing what caught their attention, and the paper did not limit photographers’ film and processing supplies including paper and chemicals. Though his work ranged all over North San Diego County, and at times farther afield, most of Rios’s work was focused on the people and happenings of Escondido and North San Diego County.

When Rios arrived at the Times-Advocate in the morning, typed assignments from reporters or editors – and later envelopes with the assignments written on them – would be waiting. Rios would divvy out the assignments to himself and other photographers. The assignments would contain detailed information on the photo shoot; people and places to shoot, addresses and times if needed, background context on the article, and anticipated publication date.

Once assignments were handed out the photographers would hit the road. Reporters and photographers would often arrive separately for a story as dictated by the needs of their days. When on the scene of a shoot, Rios was able to picture the image in his mind’s eye, and most of the time new what the final result would be before the film was developed. Once the photography for the day was finished, photographers would drop the film off for processing; early on it was Rios that did the processing, but the Times-Advocate eventually hired a lab technician, which freed Rios up to do more photography a day, and allowed for him to shoot grab art.

Once the photographs were developed, the photographers would write the important information on the back of the prints and drop them off with the paper’s reporters and editors, who would write the captions and handle the layout. About half of Rios’s assignments were for publication the next day, and the other half for longer-running stories. Rios also had the duty to shoot the Sunday supplement color cover image.

The Times-Advocate made the jump to digital photography around 1997, most likely due to finances, as digital cameras would save the paper substantially on film and processing. Still early digital cameras were cumbersome, expensive, and did not contain much memory, and Rios found them much more constrictive to work with than cameras from the film era.