By: E&P Staff The Daily Breeze in Torrance, Calif., announced that it will end its own printing, shifting the work to privately held commercial printer Southwest Offset Printing, in Gardena, on April 4.
Printing of smaller nondaily papers associated with the 70,426-circulation Copley Press daily also will move to Gardena. Terms of what the newspaper described as a long-term contract were no disclosed.
According to Breeze reporter Martin Romjue, the change will cost 87 production jobs at the newspaper, where severance terms were negotiated for 26 unionized pressroom employees. Ten- and 35-week severance packages are to be offered to part- and full-time workers, respectively. Publisher Art Wible said his paper and its printer are trying to place former Breeze workers with Southwest Offset.
Five already have been hired, Romjue reported. The printer of London's Financial Times, The Christian Science Monitor and Japan's Asahi Shimbun also will need the larger staff to print the Copley papers and the 55,000 daily and 90,000 Sunday copies of The New York Times that the Breeze prints.
Wible attributed the Breeze's decision to the Times' search for more advanced production capabilities. Among the first print sites for the Times' West Coast distribution, the Breeze has printed the Times on its 36-year-old Goss Metro presses since 1982 (E&P, Feb. 17, 2003). Southwest Offset prints on Heidelberg (now Goss) Mercury presses. It takes over Times printing on Jan. 1.
Romjue reported Wible saying that although printing the Times accounted for 8% of Breeze revenue, savings from outsourcing its own printing will be twice that amount.
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