An estimated 105 people will lose their jobs in March as the New Haven Register proceeds with a plan to close its printing operation.
The paper’s publisher, Tom Wiley, notified the state Department of Labor’s Rapid Response Unit of the plan under the WARN act, designed to give communities advance notice of pending job losses.
Click here to read the notice.
According to the notice, the Journal Register East company (the Register’s corporate parent) plans to carry out its plan to “permanently cease its newspaper print production operations … on or about March 5. …
“Approximately 105 employees will be separated from employment as a result of this action.”
The Register will now be printed by the Hartford Courant at its Hartford plant. So will two other Journal Register dailies, the Torrington Register Citizen and Middletown Press; as well as the Norwalk Hour, a separate daily which contracts with the Journal Register for printing.
The move was expected. Journal Register officials have said that as part of their “Digital First” plan — emphasizing the web over print to build a business model to survive in the new-media world — they want to concentrate their money and time on the “core” job of writing and editing news stories and involving readers. They are outsourcing jobs like printing and centralizing back-office operations out of state. Read about those plans here, here, here, and here.
The company has also been looking for new space for its editorial offices. It plans to sell its Long Wharf plant and station at least some reporters and editors in downtown New Haven, in a combined newsroom-public coffee shop space; and perhaps station other employees in a suburban location.
The New Haven printing operation includes three divisions, according to company Connecticut Group Editor Matt DeRienzo: the crew running the press; the mail room (which deals with inserts and grocery flyers); and the trucking section, which brings papers to distributors and drops bundles for home-deliverers. While around 105 people will lose their jobs in March, some people will continue working, mostly in the trucking division, DeRienzo said. He didn’t have an exact estimate of how many people that would be.