Washington Times Outsources Printing to Baltimore Sun

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By Frank Ahrens

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 7, 2008;

The Washington Times will outsource its printing to the Baltimore Sun beginning Sept. 8, shutting down the paper’s New York Avenue presses, the Times told employees yesterday.

"Outsourcing our printing was becoming absolutely necessary," Times general manager Dick Amberg wrote in an e-mail to Times employees yesterday. "Our current equipment and capabilities had become inadequate for the present and untenable for our planned growth. Because our presses are old, we would need to spend many millions of dollars over the next few years just to tread water maintaining our current operating capacity."

The Times, which is owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, has a daily average circulation of 93,775 and is working to "climb toward profitability," Amberg wrote. Analysts estimate that Moon has subsidized the paper by at least $1 billion since its launch in 1982. Amberg confirmed the authenticity of his e-mail in an interview yesterday.

The outsourcing will be a needed revenue boost at the Sun, whose parent company — Chicago’s Tribune Co. — is slashing costs as ad revenue declines in order to service $13 billion in debt incurred when the company went private under real estate magnate Samuel Zell last year.

The Times hired former Washington Post and Associated Press reporter John Solomon as its executive editor in January and instituted a number of changes in design, headline language and staffing, including layoffs. The paper also ended its Saturday print edition and created a combination broadsheet-tabloid edition for Sundays. Amberg said the Times is printing about 68,000 copies of its new Sunday paper.

Amberg’s e-mail also said the Times would outsource its commercial printing to another shop, which was not identified, by Oct. 1. Some Times production workers would keep their jobs with the paper, others would remain for a short period as the paper sells its presses and others may have the chance to get similar jobs at the Sun, Amberg wrote.

August 7, 2008