Press Democrat enters new era as Sonoma County printing press closes, production moves to new site

Sometime a little before midnight changes Sunday into Monday, The Press Democrat’s printing press in Rohnert Park will go quiet for the last time. The final sheets will zip along a thrumming, Rube Goldberg-style, mile-and-a-quarter-long conveyor belt, then get sorted and batched and bundled and carried to the trucks that wait dutifully at the loading dock.

There’s a newspaper to get out, just as there has been every night in Rohnert Park for 35 years, 10 months and 9 days.

There will be many more papers. But Monday’s edition will be the last one brought to life in the three-story building off Highway 101. Beginning Monday night, The Press Democrat will be printed at the San Francisco Chronicle’s production site in Fremont.

It’s the end of an era for this newspaper, which has printed in Sonoma County since 1857. And it’s a life transition for the workers who have toiled behind the scenes to bring you birth notices and obituaries, scandals and tearjerkers, breaking news and comic strips.

“It’s sad and exciting at the same time,” said Bill Fuiten, a press supervisor with just shy of 30 years’ experience in Rohnert Park. “Sad because I still love my job. Working here, especially in the last 10 years, is like watching a really good friend die super slowly. Now maybe I can equate it to finally putting them in the ground.”

The PD printing press was “a state of the art facility, the best in its class” when it opened, said Troy Niday, who oversees the plant as Sonoma Media Investments’ chief operating officer. It’s no longer that. The Chronicle’s presses are much newer. But aging machinery isn’t the problem. This press could operate another 10-15 years, according to Niday.

The move to the East Bay has much more to do with the economic reality of the news business, where readership has been gravitating from print to digital spaces for years.

When the Rohnert Park plant opened in 1986, Niday said, The Press Democrat had 100,000 print subscribers. The paper has about 30,000 now; another 17,000 or so own digital-only subscriptions.

“We’re basically using the facility at about 30% of capacity, with a lot of overhead costs that don’t make sense,” Niday said. “We have a cold press 70% of the time. You can’t make money that way.”

In taking its print operation to a shared regional site, The Press Democrat is joining a wave of other daily newspapers. When the Poynter Institute of Media Studies wrote about the trend in March 2021, the previous three months alone had seen the outsourcing of print operations at the San Antonio Express-News, Tampa Bay Times, (Memphis) Commercial Appeal, (Louisville) Courier Journal, (Eugene, Oregon) Register-Guard and (Raleigh, North Carolina) News & Observer, among other outlets.

The migration was accelerated after the 2008 recession, and again in the past three years, driven this time by the COVID pandemic and consolidation within the industry.

“We’re actually kind of late to this game,” Niday said.

If the closing of the Rohnert Park plant is rational, or even inevitable, it’s still a bittersweet move. The facility employs 22 full-time employees and 20 part-timers. The combined experience of the 42 workers is about 675 years, Niday said.

“I’ve grown old with these guys,” said Fuiten, who at 57 may be exaggerating his decrepitude. “Everyone on day (shifts) here has been here at least 30 years. When we started, we were young kids. It’s amazing when I look around how many houses this job has bought. And cars. And diapers.”

Wednesday, Fuiten brought his 4-year-old grandson Jace to the plant and let him literally stop the presses with the push of a button. He didn’t want the place to close without the boy knowing what grandpa’s job looked like.

Sharon Ausiello, who just turned 65, has been part of the press team for 31 years. Ausiello is one of four packaging supervisors at the plant. They stuff inserts into paper wrappers called jackets, bundle papers and send them out for distribution. All four of those supervisors are 30-plus-year veterans.

When Niday took over the operation in 2014, Ausiello said, he asked her what she liked about her job. She said no two days were alike. Each brought a new challenge and a new source of stress.

“It’s a deadline department, so there’s pressure to get it done on time,” Ausiello said. “And we’ve always done it. You’d never know the nightmare that went on in that building, but we got it done. And it was on clean, and it was on time.”

Case in point: the time she and fellow supervisor Art Alvarez were the only people on the packaging floor, presses running, and a strapping machine failed. (It’s a device that wraps a thin plastic strip around a stack of newspapers and glues the strip to form a tight band.) Then another failed. Then another. They started with eight machines that night, as Ausiello recalled. They ended with one.

“We were trying to stack papers and keep it going, and we did it,” she said.

Readers knew who wrote the articles the next day. They didn’t know who had worked like Lucy and Ethel on the chocolate factory assembly line to get the newspapers off the floor.

“This group since I’ve been here has had to deal with fires, floods and the pandemic,” Niday said. “We were cyberattacked. And this group has rolled with all of that and continues to show up and get the job done. They really are unsung heroes.”

One of the few people who can claim seniority over Ausiello is Anthony Munger, a 35-year veteran.

His path to becoming a pressman — they keep that hypnotizing conveyor belt in motion — seems predestined. Munger’s grandfather was a pressman in San Francisco (as far back as the 1930s). So was his father, along with two older brothers.

“I was born into it,” Munger said.

When he was in middle school, Munger used to tag along with his dad and spend the night lullabied by the San Francisco Examiner’s press. This was when type was set with hot metal plates. Much later, Munger helped The Press Democrat transition from manual typesetting to digital printing.

“When we worked on the old presses, you had to turn toggle switches and flip handles,” he said. “We’d walk from one end of the press to the other. It felt like I’d walk about 10 miles a night. Then it went to where you stay in one place and watch a screen.”

The fun part, Munger said, was becoming an impromptu editor and catching the occasional mistake at the last minute — a wrong date, a blank page or a messed-up ad.

Munger will be 65 in September and is in position to retire. But he loves the job so much, he’d planned to work the presses until he hit 70. That won’t happen now.

The closing of the Rohnert Park facility is something everyone has anticipated. Workers knew how the industry was going. They noticed the diminished press runs. They noticed how colleagues would whip out their phones in the break room rather than leaf through a warm newspaper.

Still, the announcement hurt.

“I think we all thought we had another year or two,” Ausiello said. “So when it hit, it hit hard. But we have seen the decline. We knew it was coming, just not now.”

Sonoma Media Investments, the parent company of The Press Democrat, is doing what it can to “help these guys build a bridge to another chapter in their lives,” Niday said. Those efforts include hiring an outside firm to help write resumes, linking employees with job consultants, offering training seminars and an on-site job fair with local employers, and providing one-on-one career counseling with about a dozen workers.

Still, there is concern for those who are too young to retire, but so steeped in the printing trade that they’re best suited to a shrinking profession.

Saturday, April 2, would be the hard day, Ausiello said last week. She expects a full crew working on the big Sunday paper, and she figured some tears would flow. The last day will be quieter. And probably even stranger.

Bill Fuiten will be one of five pressmen working that night. He hears a few more might pop in for one final chance to toast one another, and to pay respects to the machinery they used to spin straw into journalistic gold for nearly 36 years.

“I don’t know if I should tell a reporter this,” Fuiten said. “But I’m pretty sure we’ll pop a bottle or two after that last shift.”

You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.