A Storied Newspaper Prepares to Print Its Own Obituary
The New York Times
The Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s longtime paper of record, will publish its final edition on Sunday and become an online-only news outlet.
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.
The decision to shut the outlets coincides with a steep nationwide decline in newspaper readership that has contributed to the closure of more than 3,200 papers in the United States since 2005, according to the Local News Initiative at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. (The Jersey Journal, which for 157 years has been based in New Jersey’s most densely populated county, was selling just 2,600 papers a day.)
But The Ledger’s demise also leaves New Jersey with what researchers say is the distinction of being only the second state in the country to have its primary paper move completely online. In 2023, The Ledger’s parent company similarly stopped printing a statewide newspaper in Alabama as it beefed up its Pulitzer Prize-winning online news site there.
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