Northwest Offset Printing, The Spokesman-Review’s printing facility and Spokane’s leading large-scale printer, is ceasing operations in September.
Following this, Hagadone Media Group, a historic competitor of the Cowles Co. and owner of the Coeur d’Alene Press, will take over printing of The Spokesman-Review at its North Idaho Production Center in Coeur d’Alene.
It’s a move commonly seen around the country as newspapers that once owned their presses come together to share resources in an effort to cut costs.
Northwest Offset Printing is the evolution of printing facilities that have served The Spokesman-Review for 140 years. Until the 1980s, The Spokesman-Review was printed in-house in the Chronicle building. Visitors could watch the two-story operation through a glass window. Operations later moved across the street to 1 N. Monroe St., which now serves as an office building for multiple businesses.
In June 2020, printing facilities moved from the downtown Spokane location to a smaller location in the Spokane Valley in an effort to improve the paper’s bottom line. Although there have been three to four years of “pretty good sales,” revenues this year have fallen off, making it even more difficult to sustain the printing facilities, said William “Stacey” Cowles, president of the Cowles Co. and publisher of The Spokesman-Review.
“The big problem is we need another three years of extraordinary growth to meet our projects,” Cowles said. “The print industry has been shrinking as rapidly as the newspaper industry, so finding new, big customers is extremely difficult.”
The closure comes at a time when newspapers disappear at a rate of more than two each week, and the majority of newspaper readers are accessing their news digitally rather than in print. A survey by Pew Research Center found that 48% of U.S. adults prefer websites and social media for getting their news, compared to just 9% preferring print newspapers.
“Entire communities have become ‘news deserts’ – areas without reliable local reporting,” wrote Clint Schroeder, president and executive publisher of Hagadone Newspaper & Media Groups, in a column published Wednesday in the Coeur d’Alene Press. “And with every shuttered newsroom, democracy itself is weakened.
“That’s not the future we want here. We are choosing a different path – one built on foresight, mutual respect and investment,” he continued.
Subscribers who read The Spokesman-Review should not expect any changes to their subscriptions.
“We really intend this to be completely seamless for everybody, for customers and for advertisers,” Cowles said. “The biggest disruption is for the folks at the plant.”
The plant’s 68 employees will receive severance packages, and many will receive retention bonuses to stay through their last day of operation, General Manager Riff Mattré said in a news release. The North Idaho Production Center plans to hire 10 to 15 of these workers as well as invest in new equipment to double its production capacity.
The Spokesman-Review is just one of 43 publications Northwest Offset Printing serves, which also includes weekly newspapers, direct mailers and trade magazines.
This includes General Aviation News, an aviation publication that mails print copies to thousands of readers twice a month. Ben Sclair, its owner and publisher, found out about the closure Wednesday morning, and is in the process of locating a new printing facility. He has “no doubt” he will find a new printer, which is something his publication has had to do before.
“Our online stuff, while generating decent traffic, is no way to produce a profit to make a paper,” Sclair said. “The majority of our revenue comes from our print products.”
Hagadone Media Group prints daily and weekly papers that include the Coeur d’Alene Press, the Bonner County Daily Bee, the Columbia Basin Herald and the Bonners Ferry Herald.
Although the Cowles Co. and Hagadone Corp. have been competitors in the Inland Northwest for decades, they are united by a shared mission of preserving newspapers and adapting to today’s ever-changing media landscape.
“They believe very strongly that printed newspapers need to survive, and we have complete alignment on that end,” Cowles said. “We have more in common than we have that separates us.”
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