Come January, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch will not be printed in the St. Louis area for the first time in its 146-year history.
Instead, it will outsource the printing to a press in the Columbia, Missouri, area, the paper’s executive editor, Alan Achkar, announced Monday in a statement on the daily’s website. Doing so means that the Post-Dispatch will close its Maryland Heights press, laying off 72 employees.
Though it will still be printed seven days a week and be delivered at the same time to subscribers, the paper will be missing a few developments. Earlier press deadlines mean that news that breaks in the evening will not be included in the morning paper. That loss includes reports from Cardinals night games and other sports.
Achkar attributed the change to readers choosing the digital paper over the print edition. He said readers interested in breaking news and sports coverage can find it on the paper's website.
“While outsourcing our printing will result in cost savings, it will also allow us to keep delivering on our mission: to provide you with enlightening, hard-hitting news coverage and great storytelling,” he wrote.
The Columbia press is owned by Gannett, a rival newspaper company to Post-Dispatch parent company Lee Enterprises.
This is not the first cost-cutting measure enacted by the daily newspaper. Last month, the Post-Dispatch announced that it had laid off six newsroom staffers due to financial troubles at Lee Enterprises, the St. Louis Business Journal reported.
The paper reported average monthly website page views of more than 30 million at the end of its most recent fiscal year, a daily circulation of 99,618 and Sunday circulation of 109,407.
In 2022, Lee Enterprises shareholders rejected a $141 million takeover bid from Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund known for purchasing and gutting newspapers. The following year, Lee survived a takeover attempt from Alden after the company first tried to place several nominees onto Lee’s board of directors and then sued to try to make that happen.
That effort failed, but Lee has since regularly cut costs at the Post-Dispatch — trimming its prep sports staff and slowly whittling down the newsroom, as reported by the Riverfront Times.
This story has been updated with circulation numbers from a Lee Enterprise annual report.
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the paper's average monthly website page views, which are 30,232,000.
