Star-Ledger ending print edition and closing production facility in 2025 [View all]

By NJ.com Staff
Updated: Oct. 30, 2024, 9:43 a.m.|Published: Oct. 30, 2024, 9:36 a.m.

The Star-Ledger will cease publishing a print newspaper and will close its Montville production facility in February 2025. The decision was made by the Star-Ledger’s owner, Newark Morning Ledger Co., due to rising costs, decreasing circulation and reduced demand for print.

In addition, Advance Local, which owns NJ Advance Media and NJ.com, announced that it is ending print publication of dailies The Times of Trenton and the South Jersey Times, as well as the weekly Hunterdon County Democrat. Online newspapers for The Star-Ledger, The Times of Trenton and South Jersey Times will continue to be produced seven days a week for subscribers. The online newspaper provides subscribers with 10+ exclusive daily pages of additional local and national content not found in the current printed newspaper.

The final print editions of the Star-Ledger, Times of Trenton and South Jersey Times will be published on Feb. 2, 2025. The final weekly print edition of the Hunterdon County Democrat will be published on Jan. 30, 2025, and its subscribers will have access to the Star-Ledger online newspaper.

“Today’s announcement represents the next step into the digital future of journalism in New Jersey,” said Steve Alessi, President of NJ Advance Media. “It’s important to emphasize that this is a forward-looking decision that allows us to invest more deeply than ever in our journalism and in serving our communities.”

https://www.nj.com/news/2024/10/star-ledger-ending-print-edition-and-closing-production-facility-in-2025.html

This is really sad for me. I worked there as a reporter in the 1980s

The online edition, to be honest, mostly sucks, even though I subscribe to it. It is a pathetic digital ghost of a once-proud paper that used to cover practically anything that sneezed in its North Jersey and Central Jersey coverage area. Heaven forbid that a local reporter missed a story. It meant being summoned up to Newark for a loud and humiliating tongue-lashing by Andy, one of the main editors, in front of the entire newsroom. I lived in dread of getting the Andy treatment, and fortunately I never did.

And the shutting down of the Hunterdon Democrat, once one of the finest weekly newspapers in the state, is a damned shame.