The Times-Picayune might still hit doorsteps of homes across the metro area several days a week, but after tonight the newspaper will no longer be printed in the city it serves.
Beginning Sunday, The Picayune will roll off the presses in Mobile, Ala., and be trucked into New Orleans each morning, ending nearly two centuries of newspaper printing here.
The move comes as Advance Publications, the paper’s parent company, continues to shift its focus to pixels over print.
Before the decision to shut down the printing presses at The Times-Picayune building, the biggest change to the 178-year-old publication came in 2012 when the owners reduced home delivery from seven days a week to three and laid off 200 employees as it merged its Web and editorial staffs. Since then the paper has returned to printing every day, but home delivery remains limited to Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.
The shift from a seven-day, home-delivered newspaper came as publishing companies across the country grapple with plunging advertising revenue and sagging circulation as more people use a computer or cellphone to read the news, often a little or no cost.
Advance Publications has been among the most bullish of media companies in regard to transitioning to a digital-first strategy while looking to cut the high costs associated with publishing a newspaper.
The Times-Picayune traces its roots to Jan. 25, 1837, when Francis Lumsden and George Wilkins Kendall printed the first edition of The Daily Picayune, a four-page newspaper.
Since then The Times-Picayune, which was the result of a merger of nearly a half-dozen other newspapers, printed in the city without interruption until Hurricane Katrina, when flood waters forced the staff out of its Howard Avenue headquarters.
Printing resumed days later, first at the Houma Courier and then at the Mobile Press-Register, a sister newspaper.
Now, more than a decade later, the printing once again shifts to Mobile, where it will remain.
Because of the distance the papers will have to travel, some people have expressed concern about pushing up deadlines and, in turn, producing a newspaper that has less timely information. But Times-Picayune/Nola.com editor Mark Lorando said in a recent post on the Web site that those fears are unfounded.
“The new presses are considerably faster than our current ones, so the longer delivery distance will not significantly impact daily deadlines,” Lorando wrote. “And we will still be able to hold the presses when we want to ensure that major late events such as elections and Saints night games make the next day’s paper.”
But printing outside of a paper’s coverage area isn’t unheard of, and the Picayune was something of an outlier in recent years as its printing plant remained at its headquarters. Many papers moved their printing presses off site as technology changed and readers moved farther into the suburbs.
Some papers in recent years stopped their own printing all together. The Fort Wort Star-Telegram, for example, is printed by The Dallas Morning News at its plant in Plano, Texas, nearly an hour away from Forth Worth.
The Cincinnati (Ohio) Enquirer, meanwhile, prints at the Columbus Dispatch’s plant, which is an hour-and-a-half away.
Closer to home, The New Orleans Advocate is trucked in every morning before dawn from Baton Rouge.
Not too soon after The Picayune’s presses turn off, the nearly 50-year-old plant with its landmark clock tower will go dark as well.
The majority of the news and advertising staff moved to new offices at the top of One Canal Place in late 2012.
Since then, a small number of copy editors who edit stories and design pages did so from the Picayune plant.
But in recent weeks, they too left the building and moved to renovated office space at the paper’s former East Jefferson bureau on the I-10 service road in Metairie.
That staff will also design the pages of the Mobile Press-Register, Birmingham News, Huntsville Times and Mississippi Press, all sister papers.
After printing moves to Alabama, the pressmen whose job it was to operate the presses will have one final assignment: disassembling the machines, completed in the late 1980s, that were responsible for bringing readers the biggest headlines of the last quarter century.
Lorando did not respond to a request for comment about what the future holds for the building. But on nola.com he wrote that work continues in regard to that.
“We began exploring options for the Howard Avenue building when we announced the move to a regional printing plan in October 2014, and continue to do so. The building will remain the property of NOLA Media Group and work will continue at the site for the next several months while the presses are decommissioned.”