Shop the Presses

For more than a century, the daily rumble of its downtown printing presses and the roar of its delivery trucks signaled the news rolling out of The Oregonian.

But on June 30, a huge omen for the newspaper's future arrived via a digital whisper on its website, OregonLive.com. The presses would be closed, the printing plant sold, and the newspaper printed by a private contractor. The move will cost as many as 100 of the newspaper's longest-serving employees their jobs.

The Oregonian's New York-based owner, Advance Publications Inc., signaled its intention in 2013 to move toward digital delivery of the news, and the paper is hardly alone in wanting to shift aggressively to the Web.

News media industry observers say Advance is taking big steps in a national trend of jettisoning print facilities, which can account for half the costs of newspaper publishing. 

Ken Doctor, a longtime news industry analyst and a onetime editor and publisher in Oregon, says few newspapers have been willing to follow Advance's reduction of print, but other papers will be forced to confront the same choices.

"They're right," Doctor says. "By the year 2020, most people will access the newspaper on a digital basis. At some point, the print volumes don't justify the whole process, and the daily newspaper goes away."

Advance, owned by the heirs of founder S.I. Newhouse, has enforced radical changes at The O as part of its “digital first” strategy. 

The newspaper went through major layoffs in 2010 and 2013, ended daily home delivery of the newspaper, shrunk the print version to a tabloid, and sold off the paper’s Southwest Broadway headquarters. Advance also introduced steep Web quotas that rewarded—and potentially punished—reporters for how often they posted to OregonLive.com (“The Click Factory,” WW, March 26, 2014). 

The latest decision could rival the severity of the last round of cuts, when nearly 100 people lost their jobs. An Oregonian employee, who spoke with WW on condition of anonymity, says 14 customer service representatives were told June 30 they would be laid off in August. They were also told The O's customer service department would be outsourced to a Colorado company.

Sources tell WW that between 30 and 100 printing press employees will lose their jobs. 

Kevin Denny, vice president and general manager of Advance Central Services Oregon, which manages the newspaper's physical operations, declined to comment for WW. The company hasn't filed a layoff notice with the state, required of companies eliminating more than 50 jobs.

Since 2009, more than 140 newspapers in the nation have shuttered production plants, according to the printing industry journal News & Tech. 

Most have been small- or medium-sized papers, which outsource printing to larger newspapers nearby. These bigger papers, in turn, have used revenues from this printing business to cover the costs of running their own presses. The Oregonian, for example, took on the job of printing the Salem Statesman Journal in 2012.

But Advance has closed presses at the largest papers in the cities where it operates.

"Advance is consolidating as much as they possibly can—not just Portland," says Tara McMeekin, editor in chief of News & Tech. "They're looking to do as much as they can with as little as they can."

In October, the Advance-owned Times-Picayune in New Orleans announced it would close its presses, lay off more than 100 workers, and print the paper at a company plant in Mobile, Ala.—trucking it across two state lines each morning for delivery.

Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, says that by shutting down its Portland presses, Advance is giving The Oregonian more flexibility as it changes its operational DNA.

“There’s been no American newspaper company that has been more aggressive in transitioning from print to digital as Advance has,” Benton says. “That has led to a lot of pain along the way. We’ll have to talk in 10 years about whether it was the right strategy or not.” 

WWeek 2015