The printing presses at 4800 Tiedeman Rd. in Brooklyn, home to the Plain Dealer’s newsroom and publishing operation, don’t run nearly as often as they used to back when the PD hit doorsteps every morning.
This fall, they’ll be running more frequently.
The Buffalo News today announced that it will close its printing presses in the city and instead have the paper printed in Northeast Ohio by the Plain Dealer beginning sometime later this year.
Around 160 jobs at the Buffalo News in printing and distribution will be impacted, according to the outlet’s story today.
“Our focus on maintaining journalistic excellence while keeping pace with changing reader habits has led us to a difficult place,” Tom Wiley, publisher of The Buffalo News, told the paper. “This change will allow us to sustain investments in the journalism that is at the core of our mission.”
In a statement on Monday, the Buffalo Newspaper Guild said it was “disappointed that Lee Enterprises continues to focus its efforts on ways to reduce costs at The Buffalo News rather than on ways to invest in the operation. Today’s announcement by Lee that it plans on shifting printing more than 3 hours away to Cleveland is the latest guy-wrenching blow to this news organization and this community.”
“We understand the challenges of the local news business and the need to grow the digital side of the operaiton,” it continued. “Lee has, unfortunately, rolled out digital products, such as The Buffalo News’ website and mobile app, that have further hindered our progress to transition digitally.”
Plain Dealer/Advance Ohio publisher Brad Harmon told Scene the arrangement is good news for the paper.
“We are extremely excited to be selected as the site to print the Buffalo News. This will create job opportunities as we will hire additional press operators and mailer positions,” he said. “The Plain Dealer has grown the commercial print business and we currently print 25 different newspaper titles on a weekly basis. Titles such as WSJ, Willoughby News Herald, Lorain Journal, all of our Michigan papers, and Plain Dealer/Sun Newspapers to name a few. We continue to have a strong print product overall. Both the print operation and business overall are profitable. Cleveland has multi-year print commitments such as with the Buffalo News.”
While the imminent decommissioning of the Buffalo News presses most directly impacts that paper, colleges around that area have used the presses for student newspapers. According to a report from WIVB, those schools haven’t yet heard what will happen to their arrangements.
“College newspapers rely on bigger organizations to print their editions since obviously, a school like Canisius can’t afford to do that themselves,” an editor of the Canisius College newspaper said. “So, I hope we are able to continue our partnership with the News since, otherwise, we’d have to look elsewhere to print our paper, something we hope to not have to do.”
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This article appears in Feb 8-21, 2023.