Spokesman-Review Newspaper’s Printer to Close in September

The paper lives on, but will switch publishing companies.

 The Spokesman Review Newspaper will now be published by Hagadone Media

The Spokane Area Journal of Business and the WA Employment Security Department, said the publisher, Northwest Offset Publishing, will close in September, and 68 jobs will go away.

NOP currently publishes the Spokesman, and 42 other publications, including direct mail, flyers, lifestyle magazines and tourism and real estate publications.

According to the Journal, an announcement from Cowles Publishing, who runs the Review, that "headwinds" in the printing industry were too strong to overcome. In April, the Cowles family, who founded the 132-year-old newspaper, donated its assets to the non-profit Comma Community Journalism Lab. That group partners with local school districts, regional universities, and other non-profit-based news organizations.

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Hagadone Media, who prints the Coeur d' Alene Press, the Bonner County Daily Bee, The Columbia Basin Herald, and the Bonner's Ferry Herald, will take over publishing of the Review.  Although Hagadone and NOP are competitors, officials said it made sense to make this move from a business standpoint.

The Journal says both companies will spend the next months installing the necessary equipment to enable Hagadone to publish the paper.  The 68 workers will hopefully stay on to the end, according to officials, and will be given severance packages.

The Review is not the only paper to do this, the Tri-City Herald sold and closed its publishing operations in Kennewick in 2012, turning it over to the Yakima Daily Herald.    Then in 2023 the Herald stopped daily publishing, returning to a twice-a-week format as it did in its earlier years.

Increased financial pressures have squeezed many larger publications into smaller, corporate run operations, or shut them down altogether.