When I was home over Christmas, I was digging through some of my dad’s baseball memorabilia when I came across a copy of the Washington Post from March 7, 1999: “Printing Revolution Spurs New Look,” the lead headline read. The paper was such an incredible artifact that I took photos of each of its pages.
The paper was a “special edition” printed to commemorate the opening of its College Park, Maryland printing press, where my dad worked for years. This special edition was presumably one of the first papers that came off those presses. It was an almost unimaginably optimistic time for the journalism business: “Newspapers are flying off the Washington Post’s new presses—four in its Springfield plant and four more in a new building in College Park,” the article read. “These papers are different from those printed even several weeks ago. They showcase state-of-the-art advances in the industry and culminate a printing revolution that began in the 15th century on Johann Gutenberg’s moveable type.” In a photo, the publisher of The Post, Donald Graham, posed with a stack of “some of the first color papers at College Park.”
An info box called “Things to Know” explained that The Post printed 800,000 copies on weekdays and 1.1 million copies on Sundays. In a letter from the publisher titled “Changes Benefiting Readers, Advertisers,” Graham wrote that the new printing plant was “the newspaper’s biggest investment ever” and cost $230 million. “You don’t spend that much money without a very good reason, and this morning’s Washington Post is that reason—a better printed, better-organized paper,” he wrote. “Within these walls work some of the best engravers, press operators, mailers and helpers, machinists, electricians, engineers, paper handlers, and general workers in the American newspaper industry […] you don’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars unless you have confidence in your readers and community and an unshakeable determination to meet their needs. No newspaper has better or more loyal readers, and none works harder to earn and keep its readers’ trust.”
You know the rest of the story. Graham eventually sold the newspaper to Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, for a little more than The Post paid for those printing presses. In the short term, Bezos invested in the paper but has appeared to have lost interest in employing large numbers of good journalists, at least some of whom reported aggressively on his various businesses. On Wednesday the Post laid off hundreds of journalists, which destroyed entire sections of the newspaper, including much of its foreign bureau coverage, and gutted many of its sections.
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