The Star-Ledger's last print edition came out today, Feb 2, 2025

[Wicked Blue]

A Storied Newspaper Prepares to Print Its Own Obituary
NY Times
Feb. 1, 2025

In its heyday, The Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s longtime paper of record, boasted the nation’s largest State House bureau, an enviable circulation and enough editorial clout to alter the trajectory of the region’s defining infrastructure projects and environmental preservation efforts.

Reporters were well paid and often remained at the paper throughout the arc of their careers, imbuing The Ledger’s news coverage with institutional memory and gravitas, even as its thick, zoned editions were crammed with mundane dispatches from the state’s quilt of tiny towns and big cities.

On Sunday, The Ledger’s nearly century-long run as New Jersey’s dominant newspaper will come to an end when it prints its final edition and shifts to an online-only format. Its editorial board will vanish, as will its clippable sports photos and pages of printed obituaries.

Its sister publication, The Jersey Journal, one of the earliest holdings in the Newhouse media family’s now-vast empire, will cease to exist in print or online, leaving Hudson County, N.J. — a hotbed for political corruption — without a daily newspaper. Three other affiliated papers, The Times of Trenton, The South Jersey Times and The Hunterdon County Democrat, will stop printing and offer only digital news.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/nyregion/new-jersey-star-ledger-prints-final-edition.html

I was a reporter in the Star-Ledger's Middlesex County bureau in the 1980s, a time when it was the 15th-largest newspaper in the U.S. Our mission was to cover everything that happened in our beats, and heaven forbid if we missed a story. If another paper had a story that you missed, you'd be ordered up to Newark for a savage tongue-lashing in front of the entire newsroom by Andy Stasiuk, one of the editors. I lived in dread of getting the Andy treatment and managed to avoid it by staying on top of everything I could. We were told to cover our circulation area like a blanket.

The Star-Ledger had some great years after I left to move out of NJ, but more recently it was a shadow of its former glory. And that is a very great pity, because nobody is covering the political events and happenings in the state's townships and boroughs. Nobody is there to keep an eye on things so the public stays informed.

Many newspapers in the US have ceased publication in the past few decades. Some have gone online, but what happens if the power goes out or if something happens to the internet? It's a scary thought.

[hay rick]

1. End of an era.

I lived most of my life in New Jersey and was always a subscriber. I associate the decline of print newspapers with the concurrent deterioration of American political debate and institutions.

[Wicked Blue]

3. I agree with you.

Politicians can get away with a lot more if nobody is watching.

[LoisB]

2. A sad day. The Star-Ledger was my go-to newspaper when I lived in New Jersey.

[IbogaProject]

4. Our whole country was created in the context of printed media and Newspapers

So sad to watch these go, but here we are all just interacting online.

[3Hotdogs]

5. It's now, almost useless. Lots of articles about people getting killed in accidents and fires in apartment buildings.

They used to print about legislation that was up for consideration and how Congress members and NJ government legislators voted on bills.


$13.00 for a year's online subscription. I'm not even sure that is worth it.

Now, you might get an article on legislation that was passed that might affect you in some way or another ---- AFTER it is passed.

[hay rick]

6. Unfortunately, I don't believe there are enough readers to sustain that kind of coverage.

We live in a distracted, instant gratification society.

[3Hotdogs]

8. Not so. The votes in the statehouse and Congress are listed individually on significant issues.

One statehouse reporter would do a descent job of gathering information and writing a couple of paragraphs about it.

[hay rick]

9. The people that pay reporters' salaries evidently don't think it's a profitable market.

My sense is that things like statehouse coverage were loss leaders for newspapers. They did it because it was expected of a paper that aspired to be the "paper of record" for the state. There was a sense of civic obligation. Newspapers now are small parts of cost-cutting, profit-seeking chains that place profit over civic duty. I suspect the new reality causes bleeding ulcers for the dinosaurs left over from the print era.

[Wicked Blue]

10. The Star-Ledger used to be a moneymaker with tons of advertising

The death of classified advertising because of Craigslist and other internet sites really hurt them. Many big department stores went out of business, which drastically cut down on the number of Sunday advertising inserts. Amazon killed a lot of those businesses as well.

The Newhouse family that owns Advance Publications and Nj.com owned the Star-Ledger and numerous other publications. They are extremely wealthy. Among other things they own Conde Nast which publishes Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Wired and the New Yorker.

Wikipedia has this:

Advance Publications, Inc. is a privately held American media company owned by the families of Donald Newhouse and Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr., the sons of company founder Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr. It owns publishing-related companies including American City Business Journals, MLive Media Group, and Condé Nast, and is a major shareholder in Charter Communications (13% ownership), Reddit (30% ownership), and Warner Bros. Discovery (8% ownership).

[hay rick]

11. They have prospered.

I recall reading the McPaper book about Gannett decades ago.

[Wicked Blue]

12. The Newhouse publications have nothing to go with Gannett

Advance Media is privately owned by the Newhouse family, while Gannett is publicly traded.

[hay rick]

13. Thanks. My memory doesn't always serve me well.

[Wicked Blue]

7. The online version is pathetic

The home page is so disorganized that it's almost impossible to tell the latest news story from something that happened days ago. They leave junk stories about changing your clocks for Daylight Savings Time or vice versa up for months. Who won the latest lottery seems to be one of the most important topics they bother to cover.

Now they have also canned the entire editorial board, which means no more editorials. They should be ashamed of themselves.

I subscribed to the online publication when we moved back to NJ last year, because the print edition was too expensive. On the rare occasions when I bought a print copy out of curiosity, it was filled with stories that had been posted online days earlier.