Is 'Wall St. Journal' Closing Its Suburban Chicago Plant?

By: E&P Staff Dow Jones & Co. declined to comment Thursday on rumblings that it will close its Naperville, Ill., plant by the end of the year, and outsource the printing of The Wall Street Journal.

Chicago-area copies of the Journal have been printed at the Naperville plant since the 1970s.

Earlier this summer, Dow Jones outsourced printing of the Journal from its Denver plant to the Denver Newspaper Agency, the business agent of The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News.

Separately, the Journal's Beaumont, Texas, plant was said to be shutting down in advance of Hurricane Ike, which is expected to make landfall in the vicinity of Galveston Bay by about 2:00 Saturday morning. Phone calls to the plant Thursday late afternoon were unanswered. Other area papers were still operating. No one at Dow Jones' New York office could be reached immediately to confirm the closure.