HOT PURSUIT
A 158-year tradition will soon come to an end in Minnesota.
On Monday, Minnesota’s largest newspaper, the Minnesota Star Tribune, announced it will stop printing the newspaper in Minnesota and outsource printing to Iowa beginning Dec. 28. With it will come the layoffs of 125 workers.
The Star Tribune’s Heritage Printing Facility in the Warehouse District of Minneapolis has been operating for almost 40 years, opening in the years after the 1982 merger of the morning Minneapolis Tribune and the afternoon Minneapolis Star.
It will bring an end to 158 years of locally printed newspapers in the Twin Cities. The Star Tribune had most recently also printed the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
Star Tribune Publisher Steve Grove said the plant had been operating at only 18% of its full capacity, and that its closure will save the newspaper “several million dollars” annually.
Grove assured the public that the state’s largest media company will continue printing seven days a week, though not on presses in Minnesota. He noted the Star Tribune is one of the last major newspapers in the country that owns its own printing facility.
Newspapers have long depended on print advertising to pay for print production costs. As many of those dollars have shifted to digital, printing has become unsustainable for many outlets.
The Star Tribune joins other large newspapers across the state in printing elsewhere. For example, the Post Bulletin in Rochester is printed at a facility in Sioux Falls.
While many people probably don’t care where their newspaper is printed as long as it shows up on their doorstep or in the mailbox, it’s a sad day to see that jobs will be forever lost, and printing will go to another state.
I remember as a teenager touring the Star Tribune’s presses at its old facility. It was always fascinating to me to see how news pages roll off the presses before ending up in reader’s hands. To this day, I love the smell of the presses and having ink-stained fingers from touching and flipping through the pages.
But there’s more than nostalgia at play here.
This is another gut punch to an industry that is constantly evolving and quite often struggling to stay afloat. It’s disheartening when such an institution like the newspaper is being forced to change in a world where readers increasingly find their news online, at least in the major metropolitan areas.
The Steele County Times continues to be printed at the House of Print in Madelia located south of Mankato. The long-time printer rolls out about 35 weekly newspapers and shopper and some daily newspapers mostly across southern Minnesota. We often hear positive feedback about our print quality compared to other newspapers that print elsewhere. We hope to maintain being printed locally (Minnesota) for many years to come.
No matter what happens we plan to continue delivering the high-quality journalism our readers count on. I recently saw the Star Tribune promoting itself at the Minnesota State Fair as “the voice of the north.” We like to think of ourselves as “the voice of the south,” at least in greater Minnesota, and specifically southern Minnesota.
Rest assured, the Times is not going in hot pursuit of stopping the presses to outsource printing beyond the borders of Minnesota.