According to the 2024 State of Local News, a report released annually by Northwestern University in Illinois, since 2005, more than 3,200 print newspapers have folded, representing a number greater than one third of all newspapers in the United States. Last year alone saw the closure of 130 newspapers. Information-thirsty residents suffer, news deserts expand.
Here in Ulster County, HV1, (Hudson Valley One), is all that remains of a flower once fully formed — the Ulster Publishing empire — Saugerties Times, Kingston Times, New Paltz Times, Woodstock Times. The petals have closed, but the center lives on, its circulation stubborn: a weekly print newspaper with its Almanac heart folded inside as it pursues a dual online, doorstep distribution model, still subsisting on subscriptions and advertising.
Printed at the Southern Dutchess News warehouse in Wappingers Falls, the two sections of the weekly paper — HV1 and the Almanac — spring to life fully formed every Wednesday, having emerged through a line of Goss Community offset presses, each a cast iron monster weighing as much as a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle.
Behind them stand two vats, tall and wide enough to drown two well-fed newspaper reporters. These act as reservoirs for the gallons of black ink which is pumped out through lines attached to the presses. Aluminum plates etched with the image of the news copy and photographs are affixed to rollers and doused in ink, then the exact image is transferred to a rubber roller – called a “blanket” in industry jargon – which in its turn inks the wood-pulped newsprint itself.
The machine rumbling of the presses is constant as is the music from a radio. Over the course of an hour, Chaka Khan’s “I Feel For You” played twice, followed by “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash, which makes sense. Melle Mel raps in both songs, but I digress.
The setlist was auspicious. Tom, top button opened on his short-sleeved, button-down uniform, demystified the operation of the presses.
“This is one press line here, these are three black units and then these two units tie in to this press — these are the blacks and then the two towers there, that’s how we get the color.”
Like pulpy film wound through a modular, room-sized theater projector, the long sheet of newsprint unspools from a roll near a half ton heavy, and once conveyed through the initial line of presses, gets pulled upward through the final four stacked towers of the presses which handle colored ink – each splashed and drenched in a different hue – cyan, magenta, yellow and black – the building blocks of a rainbow of newspaper color.
Dark hair trimmed, silvering on the sides, Julio Medina works in the binding department. With the exception of a few breaks, he’s been with the operation for 15 years. The front and back sections of HV1 which together yield 32 pages on average are sorted here.
“We’re the ones that finish the product,” Medina says. “You know, we put the inserts in. We tie them up. We get them together for the order. We put it in bins, get it ready to go out, so when the guys come to pick it up, it’s already done.”
At most paper-based industries, paper cuts along the fingertips can be a problem, but Medina says they aren’t common here.
“Actually, it’s very rare that you have a paper cut because it’s coming out the press, it’s warm, it’s soft.”
Stuffed with advertising inserts, the finished newspaper is bundled and tied and then stacked on rolling mail carts to await the van that will drive them all to the headquarters on Wall Street in Kingston, where they will be organized for their distribution to post offices, to be mailed out to residential and commercial addresses in various towns, cities and states as far flung as California. A few will even cross the Atlantic.
HV1’s publisher, Geddy Sveikauskas, still remembers the first conversation he had with Al Osten, owner of the above-mentioned printhouse and publisher of three bonafide weekly print newspapers: Southern Dutchess News, Northern Dutchess News and the Beacon Free Press. Sveikauskas is loose with the dates, but says the conversation took place somewhere between 1968 and 1971. Heady years, those.
“He had just taken over that part of the business, publishing newspapers,” Sveikauskas recalls. “His father, Herman, started it, and Al grew up in the business, working as a young person. When he took over he was handling hippie newspapers and stuff like that. So I give him my idealistic dreams of what I had in mind, to start my own newspaper, and he says to me, ‘let me tell you one thing. Newspaper printing is one step better than shit.’ I remember that 54 years later. Al’s a font of wisdom.”
Another newspaper lifer, Steve Wanzer joined on to the Wappingers Falls printing operation in 1978.
“Sure. I know Geddy,” says Wanzer, “Geddy used to come in the old days with his long hair, with his beard and his sandals. He was definitely like Woodstock-Era, you know what I mean?”
The publisher still favors wearing his hair longer, and his beard and sandals.
“These were the days we used to shoot everything on cameras,” says Wanzer, “and when I started, this was in the camera room, you took the 35 millimeter film out of the camera and developed it. And when the pages were all laid out with the photographs, you had already cut the boxes, and then laid out all the different font sizes, that was all typeset, when you glue those headlines down, then you had to take them and shoot them and make them into negatives and put those negatives in the right page order so they came out on the plate right. And then the plates went on to press.”
Over the years, Wanzer has watched the job change. No more developing baths. No more cameras. No more photographs. I asked him whether the romance had gone out of it.
“It made the job a lot easier for me, for a lot of people,” he said. “In the old days, to do the Almanac, it’d probably take an hour and a half to two hours to get one section done. Now it takes me about 15 minutes.”
So maybe romance lost isn’t the right word combination. What hasn’t changed is the essential operation of the presses. Barring a malfunction, mechanically predictable and efficient, their design delivers what it always has.
“The main pressman, Lindell, does an excellent job,” says Wanzer. “He’s the guy who has to adjust all the color settings. Most of the time between Lindell and Juan… those guys can fix just about anything. And Roger. Roger worked in the printing business with his father. He’s been doing it since he was a kid.”
Roger Pitassi was hired on to do the job as a general manager for the print house in 1985. His youth immersed in ink, Pitassi has no illusions about the precariousness of the business.
“There’s not a lot of newspaper printers around anymore,” Pitassi said. “There’s a big one in New Jersey, I think where the Poughkeepsie Journal prints now. Their printing operation closed down. And there was a large printer in Dallas that just went out of business and so we got numerous jobs out of Texas.”
Working steadily and watching the craft evolve throughout his 35 years, Pitassi has seen the business model of even the largest print news operations like the Baltimore Sun and Chicago Tribune founder during the suck tide of the print-to-online sea change. Even the Daily Freeman. Only the purchase and squeeze of a vulture capital hedge fund has kept operations of their size solvent. For the famous Washington Post, whose news operation managed to avoid capsizing after all, it was only the timely interest of a billionaire which saved them.
The south Dutchess operation has been able to earn its own way largely through the patronage of two key customer groups: highschool newspapers on the one hand and filmmakers in need of movie props on the other. Set off from the newspaper printing floor, in a room where the RIP machines slumber (RIPS are Raster Image Processors which etch the aluminum plates) Pitassi gestures to two entire walls taken up with shelves supporting the copies of individual papers, to be used as reference for future orders.
“We print all over the country,” Pitassi says. “This is mostly New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts. Over here we’ve got the Carolinas and Virginia. We actually print a couple from Hawaii and these are mostly California. Every year you lose ten to fifteen percent and you hope to pick up new ones, and when you hear a printer goes out of business then you try to pick up some of their work, but it’s definitely a dying business.”
Printing fake newspapers as a reliable revenue sideline was a totally unexpected development.
“Back in maybe the late eighties, there was a movie that was filmed locally, Nobody’s Fool. Paul Newman was in it. They just called us and said, could you print us some newspapers? And we did, and it just kind of spun off of that. You get a prop master who goes and talks to somebody else, another artist, and we do tons of them now.”
Pitassi said they printed newspapers for the entire run of seasons for House of Cards and Boardwalk Empire. Recently they printed newspapers for Elsbeth.
“And there was another movie about the Pentagon Papers. Probably one-hundred different titles we did for that one.’
But it’s not all simulacrum and sophomore journalism.
“We still got quite a few newspapers,” says Wanzer. “They’re usually weeklies. The Pike County Dispatch in Pennsylvania. The Putnam County Press. The Croton Gazette. And we’ve been doing Shawangunk Journal for years, which is harder to spell. Used to be called the Ellenville Journal. That’s a good paper, though. I don’t know if we have them from every state, but just about. We have one from Hawaii. We have one from Brazil. I think that’s a regular paper but I can’t read it, so I don’t know.”
Asked which he prefers, internet news versus the print version, Wanzer responds,“I don’t really look at news much on the internet, because on the internet I don’t know whether it’s true or not.” He pauses. “Could be the same with newspapers too, I guess.”
But then Wanzer tends to get the news from the genuine articles themselves – reporters he can talk to directly, in-house. Pitassi also prefers his news from sources other than the internet.
“Maybe just because I print newspapers, I still get my daily newspaper. But I spend a lot of time in my car so I receive a lot of news in my car. As far as actually reading the newspapers, other than checking what they look like on the press, you know, I really don’t.”
What’s beyond dispute is that the number of eyeballs one can attract by publishing online is astronomically greater than compared to print, a difference not lost on advertisers.
Still, there is the sheer vastness of the internet itself paired with the oversaturation found in every sector of the global online marketplace which together tends to promote a deadening effect on potential consumer attention.
Trends do suggest that advertisers looking to hone in on niche, hyperlocal markets have belatedly recognized the value in returning to print in order to stand out from the online hum. This is because readers too appear to have been rediscovering the value in objects they can hold and feel with their fingertips. As part of a movement which resembles nostalgia, attending live music shows in live music venues, taking in live theater, watching movies in cinemas, and meeting strangers in real world settings, the craving for a return to living in the world of five senses has been palpable over the last summer – possibly a response to the hangover caused by the Covid lockdowns.
Even though advertising numbers aren’t what they were ten or twenty years ago, locally-owned print papers are not yet living on subscriptions alone. But since laying out any kind of argument here in support of supporting family-owned, grass-fed, pasture raised and free ranging, locally sourced weekly newspaper reporting would be crass, it will be better still to point out the practical usefulness of collecting and conserving a reporter’s words in a stack of newsprint.
Even if one grows lazy about reading them, or grows averse to the news itself, remember: When the electricity fails and the winter weather grows bitter, instead of breaking up the tables and the chairs for kindling, one can keep warm by burning newspapers instead.
“Or you can wrap fish in them,” says Pitassi.
Whatever one does with newspapers, Pitassi can see the institutional knowledge of the newspaper printing houses disappearing out the door with the old-school devotees.
“The older advisors tend to stick with the newspapers,” Pitassi notes, “and then when they retire they tend to retire the newspaper along with them.”
While Medina looks forward to retiring, at 64, he’s not in any burning rush.
“I really didn’t want to work after 70, but I might just keep working. If I can still do it, I want to keep on going because I think that a little work, it keeps you alive. And there’s a whole bunch of good guys here. We don’t make a lot of money but we get along.”
Medina says that when the weather is right and when the morning is slow, waiting for the action to pick up, the workers turn to grilling outside.
“We’ve got a grill outside and while the other guys do their job, one guy cooks. I’m the one that always cooks. We cook chicken. We cook hotdogs. It’s a fun environment.”
If he had things his way, after retirement he would buy a camper and travel the country.
Wherever he drove, he said he would avoid reading newspapers.
“You know why I don’t really like the news? Because the news is all bad news. Mix it up and have some good things going on! I wish that more people would be interested in doing stuff like that. It doesn’t have to be about us. It could be any story. Because it keeps us going. It keeps us printing papers.”
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