By Frank Brill, EnviroPolitics Editor
The (Newark) Star-Ledger and two sister dailies, the Times of Trenton and South Jersey Times, will cease publishing print editions in 2025 but continue to invest in their online news operations. The separately owned Jersey Journal also will shutter its print editions due to the resulting loss of the Ledger’s printing plant in Montville.
The decisions come as little surprise to anyone who has watched daily newspapers shrink in profitability in recent decades due to rising costs and the loss of subscribers to digital competitors.
More than a dozen once prominent daily newspapers have gone out of business since 2017, including the Rocky Mountain News, Baltimore Examiner, Cincinnati Post, Kentucky Post, Tampa Tribune and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
The Easton Express-Times also has announced it is sifting to online-only publishing in 2025. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette already has limited its print editions to Thursday and Sunday.
Steve Alessi, President of NJ Advance Media which publishes the Star Ledger, put a positive spin on the announcement of his newspaper’s switch to digital only. “It’s important to emphasize that this is a forward-looking decision that allows us to invest more deeply than ever in our journalism and in serving our communities.”
Alessi said that that ceasing print publication will allow NJ Advance Media to reallocate resources to strengthen its core newsroom. He said that the newsroom has more reporters than it did a year ago and has plans to continue to grow in 2025 as the organization looks to bolster reporting in previously under-covered areas of the state.
While the loss of daily newspapers has deprived readers of local news coverage in many locations across the nation, some New Jersey journalists who left the Star-Ledger due to earlier layoffs or buyouts have created digital publications like NJ Spotlight News which has proven to be a worthy competitor to the dailies in statewide reporting. Others like the Patch publications provide readers with “hyper local” digital news.
How long can daily print publications like the Bergen Record, Asbury Park Press, Atlantic City Press and Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News hold on before going exclusively digital? Also saddled high printing costs and shrinking subscriptions, the answer likely is not for long.
It’s a sad passage for former newspaper reporters and editors like me (Elizabeth Daily Journal and Trenton Times) and for a previous generation of readers who cherished the smell and feel of the dependable daily broadsheet. But computer access gives us much wider opportunities to track news from around the country and around the world. And few will miss the soggy log of paper tossed into a front- yard puddle by an adolescent delivery boy.
Related news stories:
Star-Ledger ending print edition and closing production facility
Star-Ledger, 3 Other NJ Newspapers To Cease Print Publication
End of Star-Ledger print edition
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