Great journalism holds something strong in your account. Community Reports give voice to silent people. The research story shines light on dark corners.
All of them apply to our business. That is our mission. It drives us. But at the end of the day, we are the manufacturer. Create widgets (newspapers) in the factory (press room) and distribute them to American consumers. And as a local manufacturer, tariffs are terrible for our business.
Wide range of tariffs hurt our company. It makes our manufacturing jobs less and less abundant. If the goal is to have more workers in the warehouse, it will help you know why you do the opposite.
My first job in this industry was part of the production chain. I worked in an area called Composing. There, pages were hand assembled to the press in the end. A newspaper of the age scale would have employed dozens of people each night to connect these pages. From there, the camera operator takes a photo of the page. The film was then sent to a special room, and the imager made a press plate from the photographs.
Technology erased all these jobs. Digital advances have allowed publications to design pages that are sent directly to the press plate. There are no composers, camera operators, or plate imagers. The same was true in a reduced press room, where work among hundreds of crew members was operating dozens of more refined equipment from a central control station.
This is the manufacturing method. Technology streamlines processes. Even in my early days, the labor required in this business was part of the workforce required for cold-type press runs in the 1950s and 1960s. And that was just a small portion of the time needed to use the hot type early, which more workers who deal with molten lead needed.
Technology doesn’t just change the workforce. It changed the customer. Today we publish digitally 7 days a week, but only in print for two days. More customers want their news on their devices than they do on their driveways. Shortening the printing dates meant that the printing factory was closed and moved to a shared press facility in Lakeland. The cost of maintaining plants and precrews only two days a week was feasible.
Cheap overseas labor did not do this. Technology did that. Even if printed papers become popular overnight, it would take dozens of workers, not hundreds, to make them. American manufacturing means more machines and more people operating them.
As an American manufacturer, raw materials are one of our biggest expenses, and newsprint is the largest. Most of our newsprint comes from Canada. Because it’s where the tree is. Although there are several domestic paper suppliers, Canada has climate and forest land, making it ideal.
Even if the procurement had to be moved to the US alone, assuming that the climate and land are suddenly appropriate, mature trees would take up to 20 years for it to be crushed. If you are reading this in print, the supply chain in which you created the paper will begin around 2005. If you are reading this digitally, please refer to the above.
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Like so many manufacturers, supply chain lines can take years or decades. In 2018, President Donald Trump placed troublesome tariffs on Canadian newspaper articles. There was no good option, so they had to absorb hits by buying more expensive supplies, increasing prices to customers and eliminating work.
Customs have a place in the world. Surgically and strategically use it can protect national security interests, provide critical supply chain redundancy, and increase domestic capital investments. But what we see today is a blunt instrument that shakes the market and breaks the trust of consumers. In the end, people, including people who work for American manufacturers like us, get injured with this clumsy approach.
