The ProJo will shut its printing plant; plus, Google News exec quits, and healthier news habits

The Providence Journal is shutting down its printing plant next March because its previous owner bet on a technology that is no longer supported. As a friend who’s now retired from the Journal put it on Facebook, “I didn’t realize we had the Betamax of printing presses.”

The closure could have serious consequences. The Journal, which is owned by the Gannett chain, is where a number of other Gannett papers are printed, including the regional edition of USA Today, the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, the Cape Cod Times and others. The plant also earns money by printing non-Gannett papers such as the Daily News of New York, the Boston Herald and the Hartford Courant, all owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.

According to Journal reporter Jack Perry, the closure will result in the loss of 136 jobs. He reports that some of the printing will move to Gannett’s facility in Auburn, Massachusetts, which, he writes, should result in no significant effect on delivery — but that some will move to a plant that the company owns in New Jersey. Perry explains what happened:

In 1987, The Providence Journal opened its $60 million production plant and began printing with a technology, flexography, that was new to newspapers, although the packaging industry had used it for about six decades. In relying on water-based, rather than oil-based ink, flexography was considered better for the environment, and cleaner for readers in that it wouldn’t leave ink smudges on their fingers.

Despite those and other perceived advantages, flexography didn’t catch on in the newspaper industry and replace offset printing as some expected. The English company that makes the printing plates for Providence’s flexo presses decided to stop making the plates because it wasn’t cost effective, since the Providence facility is its only remaining customer, according to Mike Niland, senior director of manufacturing, Gannett Publishing Services New England. It is the only company that makes the plates, he said.

A news industry source told me Tuesday via email that the printing quality should actually improve after the papers move from flexo to offset, though that would seem like small consolation given the early deadlines that will no doubt be imposed in order to truck papers north from New Jersey.

This is not the first time that Gannett has closed a New England printing plant. In January 2023, the company announced that it would shut down its facility in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. That closure affected two New Hampshire papers, the Portsmouth Herald and Foster’s Daily Democrat of Dover, as well as the Burlington Free Press of Vermont, located not far from the Canadian border. The printing at that time was parceled out between Gannett’s plants in Providence and Auburn, Massachusetts. Now only Auburn remains.

Digital giant quits Google

One of the giants of digital news has quit Google. Shailesh Prakash, a vice president and general manager of Google News, has quit after just two years, reports Alexandra Bruell (gift link) in The Wall Street Journal, writing: “The high-profile departure comes amid a continuing rift between Google and news outlets over how the search engine drives traffic and uses their content.”

Prakash came to Google from The Washington Post, and I interviewed him for my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls.” Like then-executive editor Marty Baron, Prakash was a holdover from the Graham family regime, though Jeff Bezos had the good sense to hold on to both of them when he bought the paper in 2013.

Though the Journal story provides little insight into why Prakash decided to leave Google, it does describe the increasingly challenging environment in which he found himself:

At Google, he brought an understanding of publishers’ frustrations as they have grappled with traffic declines and seek compensation for the Alphabet unit’s [i.e., Google’s] use of their content. While he oversaw product and engineering for the News group, he also communicated with leaders at news publishers regarding changes related to search and generative AI.

Solving those news blues

The election of Donald Trump to a second term in the White House has led a lot of us to wonder how we might change our news-consumption habits. I’m thinking about less news of the day, more deep dives into topics that may not be directly related to national politics.

Nieman Lab editor Laura Hazard Owen has some good ideas as well: print newspapers, which are better than digital at packing their journalism into a finite space; cutting back on social media, including getting rid of Twitter; recommitting to RSS; and not reading news after hours.

“I’m still a working journalist and a huge part of my job is to read and follow the news,” she writes. “I’ll still do both those things because I love them. But sometimes it’s healthy to do something you love a little less, and differently.”