Every newspaper printing-press closure is another shoe dropping on the local news landscape, and a big one dropped in June. That’s when Gannett announced that it will shutter its Pueblo Chieftain printing operation in Pueblo, Colo.
The plant is scheduled to print its final Chieftain issues this Sunday, Aug. 13. The following day the Denver Post, owned by Alden Global Capital’s MediaNews Group and located about 110 miles north of Pueblo, will take over the newspaper’s production.
The impact of this move goes beyond the 51 jobs at the Pueblo plant being eliminated, though that itself is a major blow to the community.
“That Pueblo press was the contract press for more than 50 Colorado hyper-local publications,” says Carol Wood, business innovation director for the Colorado News Collaborative, a nonprofit consortium of about 180 news organizations. “It sent the whole printing equation into a tailspin.”
Some of these publications are the sole source of local news in their communities, covering areas that will become news deserts if they disappear, Wood says. Three publishers have told her the loss of the Pueblo plant will force them out of business.
“I had one publisher sobbing and saying, ‘We can’t take anymore,’” Wood says.
This pattern of printing-press closures and consolidation has been playing out across the country over the past several years, prompting numerous local news outlets to scramble to keep publishing even if that means having their papers printed at facilities in other states or even other countries. When some presses close, existing alternatives may not be feasible for every paper printed there, which is why Wood and others are seeking new solutions.
“While it’s a dire situation for publishers, there is opportunity in our nonprofit organizations being able to assist and pull together resources to provide a pathway for new printing presses to come online,” Wood says.
Such efforts, though, are being met by fierce industry headwinds. Not every newspaper can wait for new printing presses to emerge. As much as “digital first” has long been a mantra throughout the industry, many publications, particularly those in small communities, still require print to survive.
Wood says she spoke with one Colorado publisher whose paper has 40 online subscribers. “Those 40 online subscribers are not going to sustain a news business,” she says.
I think the demise of printing presses will just accelerate the disappearance of print.
Marty Baron, Retired Executive Editor, The Washington Post
In response to an interview request about the Pueblo plant closing, Gannett’s communications department sent this statement:
“Strategic decisions must be made to ensure the future of local journalism as our business becomes increasingly digital. The challenging determination to shift production at our Pueblo printing facility to a partner facility was made after much consideration. We deeply appreciate the many years of service from our skilled team and remain committed to providing readers with quality content, while connecting our valued advertising partners with the consumers they want to reach.
“We have no further comment.”
On one level there’s logic to consolidation among the country’s newspaper printing presses. The industry continues to move online as more and more readers develop the habit of consuming news on their devices, all while print advertising dries up, newspapers diminish in size and personnel, circulation drops, and expenses related to print production and delivery rise. No wonder 45 of the country’s top 100 dailies now publish six or fewer days a week, according to data collected by the Medill Local News Initiative. The Portland-based Oregonian announced Aug. 3 that after 142 years of publishing daily, it will reduce its print output to four days a week, starting Jan. 1.
Adam Strunk, managing editor of Kansas’s Harvey County Now, wrote a column in June stating that the costs of printing and mailing that weekly newspaper had “soared by 42 percent in the past two years.” Each copy cost $3.03 to print and produce while subscribers were paying $1.26, he wrote.
“I think fundamentally, print is going away,” says Marty Baron, retired executive editor of the Washington Post. “It’s a matter of time. People have predicted that we would be all digital by now. It takes a lot longer. There are loyal readers of print newspapers, and there’s still many people out there who desperately want to receive a printed product. But the economics of print are formidable. I think the demise of printing presses will just accelerate the disappearance of print.”
Dean Ridings, CEO of the newspaper industry advocacy group America’s Newspapers, strikes a similar tone. “The closing of production facilities in general is not really a surprise, and it makes sense given that we’re really not in the business of manufacturing,” he says. “The ability to deliver our content digitally is so important, and our content is really our most valuable asset, not the delivery system.”
Citing the increased costs of printing and delivery, Ridings notes that this situation is “not all bad, as it allows us to focus on creating good journalism.”
But many publications would not be able to create any journalism without print.
Anna Brugmann, policy director for the nonprofit coalition Rebulld Local News, says rural publishers often discuss the need for “a runway” to make the transition from print to digital. “Chopping off the runway altogether means the plane runs aground,” she says.
Brugmann notes that although every news outlet must prepare for the inevitable move to digital, many communities still lack broadband internet services. In late June the Biden administration announced a $42 billion effort “to connect everyone in America to reliable, affordable high-speed internet by the end of the decade.” That positive step doesn’t solve the problem for publications currently struggling.
“There’s still an audience for print newspapers, even though that’s decreasing,” Brugmann says. “To just cut off the runway by decreasing print for certain communities, that’s not smart.”
No presses in Vermont
The supply-demand balance for printing presses is reaching a critical point in Vermont.
“There’s not a single working web press in the state of Vermont that can handle newspapers,” says Steve Pappas, executive editor and publisher of the Barre Montpelier Times Argus and executive editor of the Rutland Herald.
Each of Pappas’s two papers used to operate its own press, but “our ownership at the time made the decision to shut down the older press [in Rutland], even though it was a bigger market, and have the printing done on a newer press [in Barre].”
The Times Argus was printing both papers in 2011 when a flood took out the presses and the first floor of that facility. “That was the end of our in-house printing,” Pappas says. “It was a catastrophic loss for the print side of what we do.”
The Times Argus and Rutland Herald were temporarily printed at the Burlington Free Press before moving to a facility in Haverhill, N.H., about an hour’s drive from Montpelier. Issues arose there, Pappas says, and now “we print in Montreal, as do many of the other newspapers in Vermont, because they have the highest quality, they can provide color on every page, and they can do broadsheet or tabloid.”
But that facility’s reasonable rates are being offset by other factors. “The problem is it’s very expensive to truck and transport the product from Quebec back into Vermont,” Pappas says. For one, diesel prices have soared. Although his publications have been able to absorb those costs, he says, smaller papers are “sucking wind.”
If we have even the smallest burp in delivery, our customer service gets overrun.
Steve Pappas, Executive Editor, The Barre Montpelier Times Argus and The Rutland Herald
Then there’s the distance. If the weather is decent, and there are no delays at the border, the newspapers can make it from Quebec to the Times Argus deck in two hours and 20 minutes, with another 90 minutes added for the Rutland Herald, Pappas says. But if the roads are treacherous, not unusual in winter, and the border is backed up, those numbers rise.
“It’s a haul,” Pappas says.
Some Vermont papers are being printed even farther away. The Burlington Free Press, a daily newspaper since 1848 and owned by Gannett since 1971, closed its printing facility in 2020 and moved its press operations to Portsmouth, N.H. In early 2022 it ceased delivering a print Saturday edition, substituting digital replica. Now the Burlington Free Press is being printed five days a week in Auburn, Mass., close to a three-hour drive away, and on Sundays in Providence, R.I., about four-and-a-half hours away.
Other Vermont publications are being printed in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, just not in Vermont, no matter the demand for printed newspapers there. Pappas notes that Vermont is a “gray state” with a high percentage of its population 55 and older. Although younger generations may consume news differently, these readers prefer news they can hold in their hands.
“At least in Vermont, it’s pretty clear that the demographic that is reading newspapers wants the print product,” Pappas says. “If we have even the smallest burp in delivery, our customer service gets overrun.”
This raises the question: If the demand for printed newspapers in Vermont remains strong, why is the state bereft of printing plants?
Pappas suggests several factors:
Older presses were not energy efficient, and upgrading them became a challenge as parts grew increasingly difficult to find. Then color became a newspaper staple, which required more work to keep everything in register. There was much waste in every press run, Pappas says, all while the price of paper was volatile.
Plus, running a press is a major operation. Pappas says 40 people may be required to do the various jobs to get the papers off the presses, to bundle them and to prepare them for delivery.
“The labor shortage has peaked in the last few years, but we have seen a steady decline of people who want to work in the middle of the night,” Pappas says, noting that such workers often were required to drive long distances in wintertime at all hours. “You started losing some of those people who are really good at running presses, and when you have people who aren’t good at running presses, you start having complaints and losing subscribers. It’s a snowball effect.”
Outsourcing and early deadlines
For many newspapers and their parent companies nationwide, outsourcing became a cheaper, easier alternative, even if the quality sometimes suffered and deadlines got pushed back amid the stacking-up of press times.
Brugmann recalls that when she was a stringer in 2020 for the Gannett-owned Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Mo., its print deadline was 3 p.m., as the press also was printing local editions of various national newspapers. “It did put us a full day behind the news cycle in our print editions if something happened in the evening,” Brugmann says. “I’d cover a protest on a Wednesday evening, for example, and it wouldn’t be in print until Friday.”
Such an early deadline, she adds, “absolutely diminishes your ability to do your job. Papers are smart to think about their digital audience, but many folks do read in print. I think it can feel like an abandoning of that audience.”
At the Chicago Tribune, where I was a reporter for many years, the daily deadlines crept earlier over the years due to a variety of factors, including the consolidation of distribution centers, reduction of print shifts and press times being reserved for publications such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and even its chief competitor, the Chicago Sun-Times. Now the Tribune must vacate its longtime Freedom Center printing facility by July 2024 because Bally’s has bought the land by the Chicago River to build a $1.74 billion casino and entertainment complex. The Tribune announced in May that it has bought the northwest suburban Daily Herald’s printing plant in Schaumburg and will print the Tribune and its other clients there.
Other papers are being printed farther from home.
“How sad,” the late Columbus Free Press columnist John K. Hartman wrote in January 2021 about the effect of Gannett’s daily Columbus Dispatch having moved its printing to Indianapolis, 175 miles away. “The New York Times print deadline is now later than the local newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch. If a sporting event or news item does not occur by 4 p.m., it will not be in the next day’s Dispatch. The Times’s deadline is early evening.”
A month after this column ran, the Dispatch moved its printing again—to Detroit, about 200 miles away.
I'd cover a protest on a Wednesday evening, and it wouldn't be in print until Friday.
Anna Brugmann, Policy Director, Rebulld Local News
In March 2021, Rick Edmonds, media business analyst for the Poynter Institute, wrote that the printing trade publication News & Tech had compiled a list of outsourced printing deals, with nine announced in the first two-and-a-half months of 2021. Edmonds noted that those plant shutdowns included the Poynter-owned Tampa Bay Times in Florida and The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, with McClatchy’s Kansas City Star having shuttered its 2006 state-of-the-art plant the previous fall to outsource its printing to Gannett’s Des Moines Register 200 miles away.
News & Tech doesn’t have current statistics on printer closings because it has gone out of business.
The Buffalo News announced this February that it would be shuttering its printing plant and sending its papers to be printed by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, almost 200 miles away. The closure of the downtown Buffalo plant was reported to result in about 160 layoffs.
“It is pretty clear that this trend is going to continue,” Edmonds says, also citing the 2022 closure of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s press in West Milwaukee. Gannett announced in March 2022 that it would be moving the printing of its 11 Wisconsin newspapers, including the Journal Sentinel, to Peoria, Illinois, about 220 miles southwest of Milwaukee.
“My own sense of this is that rather than just close up print and say, ‘OK we’re going to be all digital, there are intermediate steps where the Sunday paper, which is still a good money maker, continues, with maybe another day of the week [printed], as we do here in Tampa,” Edmonds says. The Tampa Bay Times now publishes in print only on Sundays and Wednesdays.
Yet despite the discouraging trends, Pappas in Vermont and Wood in Colorado are seeking ways to keep their newspapers alive and printed in state.
“The assumption is newspapers are going to die,” Pappas says. “I don’t think they are.” While the internet is fine if you want to “hunt and peck” for something specific, he says, printed newspapers remain a “one-stop shop for what’s going on in the community.”
Given that Vermont is a largely progressive state that contains many food co-ops and other collaborative efforts, Pappas is looking to apply such a model to solve the newsprint crisis there. “The idea is to have everybody invest in it,” he says. “What we want to do is save print newspapers in Vermont.”
He envisions a establishing a press between Burlington and White River Junction toward the center of the state, where ”you’d be able to serve just about everybody pretty easily.” Perhaps his own papers, the Times Argus and Rutland Herald, and some weeklies would be the initial clients. “We don’t need the co-op in the beginning,” he says. “We know if we brought a press to Vermont, we would use it ourselves, but newspapers are in such a precarious situation, I feel very strongly that our goal here is to make sure that every community in Vermont that has a print newspaper can keep its newspaper.”
All that said, the idea remains “in the exploration stage,” with no established partnerships, financing or facility. “It’s not easy to just pick up a press and get it into place,” Pappas says. “It’s a pretty hefty project.”
Complicating matters is the labor issue. Pappas explains that working a press is “a pretty specialized skill set,” and as Vermont’s presses have been closing, those workers have moved to private presses or out of state. Opening a new press would require luring such skilled workers back to Vermont, all while the state is experiencing what Pappas calls an affordable housing crisis. “We know the demand for the product is there, but we’re not confident we can build the workforce we need to sustain a two- or three-shift printing hub.”
Short- and long-term solutions
Colorado is much larger than Vermont, yet Wood and the Colorado News Collaborative— in partnership with the Colorado Press Association and Colorado Media Project—had to look beyond the state’s borders to help publishers find presses for the papers printed at the soon-to-be-shuttered Pueblo facility. She says papers are moving to facilities in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Cheyenne, Wyoming and Kansas. “We have to come up with short-term solutions that will carry us through at least the end of 2023,” Wood says.
And, no, Colorado’s papers are not ready to go all-digital. Although the national infrastructure bill calls for a minimum of $100 million to help ensure high-speed internet coverage across Colorado, broadband is not uniformly available now, and papers need to keep printing to maintain their readership and local ad revenues. Also, Wood says, legal notices in Colorado must appear in newsprint in a paper of record—and small communities may not have more than one. If those outlets go away, governmental bodies have no place to post their notices, Wood says.
“Those are the things we’re up against and that we’re going to solve,” Wood says.
The state’s geography presents another challenge, with the Rocky Mountains dividing the Western Slope from the Eastern Plains. Wood says publications in the Western Slope mountain towns often drive three hours to get their papers printed. On the Eastern Plains, where Denver and other larger communities are located, the printing press landscape has been growing sparse. Gannett’s Fort Collins-based Coloradoan faced a three-hour-plus drive (with clear weather and roads) through the Denver metro area to be printed at the Pueblo plant. Now it will be printed by the Alden-owned Denver Post in a Denver suburb.
Some of those printing changes are having a major impact on the newspapers themselves. In Lincoln County on the Eastern Plains, the loss of the Pueblo plant prompted the merger of the Limon Leader, which serves the town of Limon (pop: about 2,000), with the Eastern Colorado Plainsman, based in Hugo (pop: about 800). The combined paper will be printed in Kansas.
“We are happy to report that we have located a new printing company,” publisher Catherine Thurston wrote in a letter to readers. “However, the costs of running the newspaper have grown exponentially over the last few years, and with the additional printing expense, we cannot continue to print two newspapers. Even combining the newspapers will not change the fact that our prices must increase as well.”
Similarly, Colorado Community Media, owner of 23 local newspapers, is merging the Parker Chronicle with the Elbert County News as well as the Fort Lupton Press with the Brighton Standard Blade. All will be printed at the Denver Post’s facilities.
Readers and journalists have pushed back on the combination of newspapers that had been serving distinct communities. Wood says one of these publishers told her the newspaper merger “has created despondency in the newsroom.”
If two or three of those came online, that would solve the problem in Colorado.
Carol Wood, Business Innovation Director, Colorado News Collaborative
From what Wood has learned, the papers forced to relocate from the Pueblo facility will be paying, on average, at least 15% more in printing costs. Some papers, such as one Denver-based Spanish-language tabloid, were still seeking a new printer less than a week before the Pueblo closure.
Once these immediate problems are solved, the coalition of Colorado media organizations can focus on finding long-term solutions, taking an approach similar to Pappas’s in Vermont. “Some of these news organizations are contemplating forming something like a cooperative that would jointly own a press,” Wood says. “They’d print themselves and would accept contract printing from other news organizations in their sphere. If two or three of those came online, that would solve the problem in Colorado.”
Wood and her colleagues are exploring a variety of tools to achieve this outcome. Some federal funding might be available if a group were to revive an existing manufacturing facility rather than to build something new. The state also may offer incentives for economic development in rural or financially challenged areas, as well as for job creation.
As for whether reopening the Pueblo plant might be an option, Gannett has put the building and press up for sale at $3.6 million, and then the buyer would incur what Wood calls “significant maintenance costs.”
“Gannett let it fall into such disrepair that it would actually take about $2 million to get that press up to speed, and no one’s going to do that,” Wood says.
Despite the formidable economic, technological and practical challenges, Wood is optimistic that these efforts to activate printing presses for Colorado’s local news outlets can succeed—and offer a model for the entire region. “If we can get ahead of it in Colorado, then we can help the publications in surrounding states also have better press opportunities,” Wood says.
Failure, in her mind, is not an option.
“This is a manufacturing problem,” Wood says. “This is a workforce problem. This is an access to democracy problem.”
Article image by Bank Phrom used under Unsplash license (Unsplash)
