Franklin, NC
(Update) Media notes: Continued changes at Citizen-Times
by Staff ~ November 22nd, 2008. Filed under: Business, Media Notes, News.As we touched on in September, the paper has cut a dozen or so jobs already this year.
Jason at Ashvegas posted on this again today, further speculating that the Asheville printing operation could be moving to Greenville.
Another update from the week of 11.20.08, as Gannett announced that it’s Asheville printing operation would indeed move to Greenville:
Web-fed printing presses – the type used to print newspapers - are labor and cost intensive. So it’s no surprise that Gannett, the Asheville Citizen-Times’s parent company, and one of the many struggling newspaper publishing companies nationwide, is looking to reinvent the way they print.
Struggling or not, Gannett is the largest publisher of newspapers in the country (largely on the strength of its publication of USA Today), and so it has the resources to look at this problem from many angles. And the angle it’s taking in Asheville is to shutter its printing facility and combine operations with it’s Greenville, SC printhouse.
This will cost several dozen jobs in Asheville, and will leave the southern mountains with two remaining web-fed printers: the Mountaineer in Waynesville and the Franklin Press. The Franklin Press prints several of the region’s weekly papers. The region’s largest independent weekly, the Smoky Mountain News prints at the Citizen-Times, so will revisit its printing routine during the next month.