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dankusner · 3 months

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The Dallas Morning News continues to bleed employees as left-wing bias is exposed

The Dallas Morning News is struggling to stay afloat.

Last year, parent company DallasNews Corp. announced that it had voluntarily bought out 6% of its workforce, which affected 40 positions at DMN.

“Today, the Company is announcing a limited voluntary staff reduction program that will be offered across all departments to eligible individuals at The News and Medium Giant.

Though the exact number of people who will take the option is unknown, it is expected that this could ultimately reduce the total workforce by about 6 percent, or 40 full-time and part-time positions,” DallasNews Corp. said in a press release.

Journalists such as Steve Brown, who had 47 years of experience, retired from DMN due to the voluntary buyout.

His reporting for DMN accounted for almost 10% of the newspaper’s digital conversions, reported The Real Deal.

Mitchell Parton, a former residential real estate reporter for DMN, left the publication at the end of last year and now covers real estate for the Dallas Business Journal.

Before that, DallasNews Corp. had losses of almost $9 million in 2022, reported The Real Deal.

Another mass layoff occurred in 2019 when DMN let go of 43 employees as a means to pivot towards a subscription-based model, according to The Wrap.

The Dallas Morning News, as a result, has been left with a majority-inexperienced staff.

As previously reported by The Dallas Express, DX CEO Chris Putnam called out DMN for its reporters’ misplaced focus and lack of knowledge.

“… [T]he only reason much of the media exists is to try and make anyone who’s not a radical like themselves look evil or ignorant.

This appears to be the objective of Dallas Morning News CEO Grant Moise and his so-called ‘journalists,’ including ‘equity’ reporter Arcelia Martin and business reporter Natalie Walters (who never actually held a job in business). They are all incompetent,” Putnam wrote.

DMN also recently admitted to left-wing bias in its reporting.

In an opinion piece titled, “Some readers think bias taints our news report. They’re right,” DMN public editor Stephen Buckley wrote:

“I do think that sometimes, when we interview sources with whom we might be sympathetic, we are not as quick to dig for other, opposing voices. We are selective about weaving in voices from all sides. In particular, conservative voices are frequently missing.”

“Executive Editor Katrice Hardy agrees that her staff is inconsistent about objectivity and fairness,” he added.

Previous DMN articles have drawn criticism, including one focused on drag queens struggling during COVID and another one about how tollway authorities are racist.

The Dallas Express contacted DMN and its publisher Moise for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

UNBIASED NEWS IS UP TO WRITER AND READER

National press shake-ups point to challenges for us all

Like everything else in 21st century America, journalism has dramatically changed, and that change has not been for the better.

Substantive issues and policy ideas now get less attention while stories focused on celebrities and self-help take up more space.

Poorly vetted information and misspellings make it to publication or air without the important checks and edits once considered fundamental.

The line between commentary and opinion-free news stories grows dimmer by the day.

Even at premiere information news outlets such as The New York Times , The Washington Post and National Public Radio, such errors have become common.

Now individual voices inside those and other major newsrooms express concern about a new journalism ethic spreading through the profession.

The complaints shaking up the American press are not just about accuracy but about pervasive political bias.

A wider range of voices has been fighting to be heard around the national “campfire” of shared ideas.

It may not be clear to news consumers, but inside the craft, deep introspection is underway.

What went wrong

In an extensive column for The Economist magazine, James Bennet, at one time the editorial page editor of The New York Times, recently detailed what he sees as flaws in the practice of journalism at top-of-the-line outlets.

“The reporters’ creed,” Bennet wrote, “used to have its foundation in liberalism.”

By that he does not mean the liberalism with which most are familiar today, but classical liberalism in which the reporter acts as “a sworn witness; the readers’ role was to be judge and jury.”

In that approach to reporting, no matter what or whom reporters covered, their goal was to ask “why” and explain the reason their interviewees and sources arrived at their ideas and opinions.

In a republic, that is a journalist’s paramount mission.

Readers, listeners and viewers draw their own conclusions based on the assembled facts and opinions of the people with whom the reporter spoke.

The journalists’ personal views on the subjects they cover matter least.

That kind of dispassionate reporting develops over years as resolute journalists rise through the ranks from small news outlets to larger ones.

However, according to Bennet, even today’s best known news organizations have abandoned “their commitments to integrity and open-mindedness.”

He points to new journalists arriving at the Times and other outlets with a different mission.

Gone is the goal of exercising complete objectivity, which Bennet argues is now considered nothing more than “code for ignoring the poor and weak and cozying up to power.”

Pursuing truth, no matter where it leads, has been replaced, Bennet suspects, by journalists who see themselves as social justice crusaders.

This new breed, whom Bennet describes as “illiberal journalists,” champion group rights more than individual rights and view the exercise of free speech as a means of protecting the privilege of white men.

They believe, to Bennet’s mind, the 2016 election of Donald Trump proves their view that American citizens cannot be trusted with “potentially dangerous ideas or facts.”

During his employment at the Times, Bennet noted, “conservative arguments in the Opinion pages reliably started uproars,” among the staff.

Multiple staffers expressed their displeasure on social media and through in-house communication channels when in June 2020 the Times ran a column by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas calling for deployment of troops to protect lives and businesses following riots that erupted after the death of George Floyd.

Even the newsroom labor union weighed in, calling it a “clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent.”

It is not just The New York Times where some journalists have raised questions about conservative coverage.

Writing in April in The Free Press, Uri Berliner, a 25-year senior editor at National Public Radio, said, “NPR has always had a liberal bent,” and until recently was “nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.”

Now, Berliner contends, NPR has dumped its mission of providing diverse viewpoints and elevated “race and identity as ‘paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.’”

He has since resigned.

The Washington Post, too, is abuzz about abrupt changes in leadership and what they might mean for the paper’s coverage.

The newsroom there is revolting against new publisher Will Lewis despite the fact that change is clearly needed:

The Post lost $77 million and half its readership in 2023, according to reporting from Wall Street Journal deputy editorial features editor Matthew Hennessey.

Recently, in examining stories in The Dallas Morning News , the new Public Editor Stephen Buckley pointed to similar concerns, noting while the paper is “selective about weaving in voices from all sides,” he has noticed that “conservative voices are frequently missing.”

Culture of mistrust

Amid the disruption, news outlets must get better about showing their work — how and why they make decisions in their “gatekeeping” function.

But that’s only a part of the solution.

In the “culture of mistrust” that pervades America in 2024, it is not enough, Buckley wrote, to say that “we tried” to contact diverse voices, but they did not respond.

Readers, viewers and listeners have every right to compare journalists’ actual practices to their stated intentions.

Any distance between the two is the degree to which their stories should be called into question.

Put simply: No matter what a news provider promises in its masthead or branding slogan — whether to be a “voice for the voiceless” or “defend traditional values” or provide “both sides of every important question” — that must be the standard by which it is judged.

Market response

But journalists aren’t the only group requiring some soul-searching.

In a free market system of news delivery, the press responds to signals from the market.

And for the last few decades the market has been rewarding bad practices.

Fox News has been the most-watched television news channel for 22 years, attracting nearly half of the total cable news viewing audience, according to Nielsen Media Research.

In such a market, it’s pretty clear that what many critics of the Times , Post and NPR really want is an echo of their own opinions.

Information fabricators already abound.

With rising reliance on the internet as an information source, the rapid spread of falsehoods, especially in an election year such as this one, daily becomes a greater danger.

Last year, Pew Research Center revealed that half of U.S. adults rely on social media for news at least sometimes.

Fixing America’s journalistic landscape will require more than tacking right or left. In improving the flow of accurate information through society, there is a role for all of us.

The crusading journalist Ida B. Wells used to say, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”

Going forward, in selecting, reporting and consuming stories, accepting only what is true must be everyone’s goal, even if it includes considering real facts with which we disagree.

For journalists, that requires making the dissemination of accurate, vetted information more important than publishing or airing it first.

And it means publishing news and opinions that are accurate and well-reasoned even if it means losing subscribers.

For news consumers it means expanding our sources of information to include perspectives that might not align with our own.

The end goal should not be to agree with or support causes, but to understand how leaders of those causes arrived at their conclusions.

That task is not an easy one.

We must all be wary of those who would distract us from it.

That requires diligence and vigilance — the obligation of every citizen in a republic.

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fmarkets · 4 months

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Dallasnews Corporation Sees Revenue Slump but Reduces Losses in Recent Fiscal Period $DALN #Publishing and Information #Nasdaq

Navigating Financial Challenges: Dallasnews Corporation's Recent PerformanceDallasnews Corporation, a Nasdaq-listed company (Nasdaq: DALN), recently released its financial results for the most recent fiscal period. During this period, the company achieved a significant reduction in its losses, despite a decline in revenue. In comparison to the previous financial reporting period, the company's deficit per share decreased from $-0.49 to $-0.25. Additionally, revenue saw a decline of 11.647%, amounting to $31.10 mill

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jenifersohowe · 5 months

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youtube

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internationalrealestatenews · 8 months

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[ad_1] The journalist who lined business actual property for the Dallas Morning Information for over 40 years is retiring. “The Steve Brown period” ends on March 1, the outlet’s enterprise editor Paul O’Donnell mentioned in a word to staffers, Speaking Biz Information reported. “For 47 years, Steve’s byline has graced The Information. He’s as well-known domestically as anybody on our workers, with a reverence that’s solely surpassed by the widespread respect Steve receives from his actual property friends throughout the nation,” O’Donnell’s word mentioned. Brown’s reporting contributed outsized financial worth to an ailing firm. His tales accounted for almost 10 % of the newspaper’s digital conversions final yr, the word mentioned, which means posts that introduced in paid subscriptions. The Dallas Morning Information supplied worker buyouts final yr in an effort to shed 40 workers, or about 6 % of its editorial workers, Poynter reported. DallasNews Company operated at losses of virtually $9 million in 2022. Its working losses amounted to $5.6 million within the first three quarters of final yr. Mitchell Parton, the newspaper’s former residential actual property reporter, left on the finish of final yr and now covers business actual property for the Dallas Enterprise Journal. Anna Butler, a former managing editor for that publication, began in January as an actual property reporter on the Dallas Morning Information. Jess Hardin has been masking residential and business actual property in Dallas-Fort Value for The Actual Deal since November. Right here’s what else is shaking in Texas actual property. MetroTex Affiliation of Realtors, the skilled actual property affiliation for Dallas-Fort Value, has named Justin Landon as CEO. He replaces Janet Kane, who “transitioned out to hunt new alternatives,” in July, in accordance with a information launch. Landon returned to Texas after six years in Lexington, Kentucky, the place he labored for Bluegrass Realtors and its subsidiaries Think about MLS and the Realtor Group Housing Basis. He beforehand labored because the vp of presidency affairs for the San Antonio Board of Reartors, and “spent greater than a decade working in Congress.” That have may show invaluable as copycat lawsuits impressed by the landmark Sitzer/Burnett ruling named MetroTex amongst plaintiffs accused of conspiring to maintain dealer commissions excessive. The Higher Fort Value Affiliation of Realtors put in Blake Barry of Williams Trew Actual Property as its 2024 board president. A Baylor College graduate, he's a third-generation actual property agent, the grandson of Joan Trew. He’s served on the affiliation’s governmental affairs and younger professionals committees, and on the board of administrators since 2020. Former Olympic athlete Kevin Ellis has joined Compass’ P. Murrell Actual Property Group in Dallas, Sweet’sDirt.com reported. Ellis competed on the U.S. males’s staff within the sport of skeleton on the 2006 Winter Video games in Torino. Newmark employed Elliott Hirshfeld to its Houston workplace company staff. Hirshfeld beforehand labored for CBRE and has over 25 years of economic leasing expertise, from mixed-use developments to massive company headquarters. —Rachel Stone Learn extra [ad_2] Supply hyperlink

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narrie · 1 year

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https://twitter.com/dallasnews/status/1679120958479540225

niall the weatherman strikes again🫠

SOOOO true of them!! missing him (neil storm)

#ask

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isshinotasuke · 2 years

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spokanefavs · 2 years

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Samuel Perry writes on twitter:

Our latest for @dallasnews. Who actually identifies with the label "Christian nationalist"? We use a recent national survey to answer that question. Spoiler: It's not a fringe phenomenon, and for some groups, it's the majority

#christian nationalist #dallas news #Samuel Perry #christian #politics #christian nationalism

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soulsoldier7 · 2 years

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This month, as I continue to honor words expressed to me by the closest friend who passed in 2009, I’ve been thinking about the vows made at the memorial this @dallasnews article highlights… “to march on in their name”. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cj3MXXZppJL/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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impressentertainment · 3 years

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A post shared by IMPRESS ENTERTAINMENT MUSIC & EVENTS (@impressent)

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caseykinney · 5 years

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Deep Ellum in Dallas Texas on Saturday night at 12:45am . . . . . . #Coronavirus #DeepEllum #Dallas #Texas #DallasTexas #DallasTX #SocialDistancing #StayInside #SelfQuarantine #Closed #DallasNews #DallasMorningNews #DallasObserver #ThisIs2020 #StaySafe #DallasNightLife #DallasNights #DTX #SupportLocalBusiness #SupportLocalArtists #SupportLocalBusinesses #SupportLocal #ShopLocal #CanonUSA #Canon5DSr #Covid_19 #Covıd19 #CoronavirusPandemic #WashYourHands #DontPanic https://www.instagram.com/p/B-BxdMwHdv-/?igshid=138ld82k3han8

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dankusner · 4 months

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Dallas Morning News moving to smaller printing plant with fewer workers, a new press

The decision will save the company an estimated $5 million a year and is a step toward returning to profitability.

Printing presses roll on Thursday, April 6, 2017 at The Dallas Morning News' North Plant in Plano, Texas.

3:38 PM on May 14, 2024

The Dallas Morning News is moving its longtime printing operation from Plano into a smaller facility in Carrollton, a decision that will save the newspaper an estimated $5 million a year in expenses and will include the elimination of about 85 positions.

DallasNews Corp., the newspaper’s parent company, plans to put the 620,000-square-foot printing plant up for sale, including an 82,000-square-foot parking garage.

It is located on 29 acres along W. Plano Parkway at Coit Road.

The annual savings will help DallasNews become profitable again, said Katy Murray, president of DallasNews Corp.

“We’re looking at all options for the property including a sale,” she said. DallasNews has no debt and a sale would shore up the company’s cash.

Based on capital investment needs to support the printing plant transition, the Board of Directors of DallasNews Corporation suspended a 16-cents-a-share quarterly dividend until further notice.

A new printing press will be purchased to go into a soon-to-be leased 67,000-square-foot building in Carrollton.

The new facility is expected to be ready in early 2025 and will cost significantly less to operate, Murray said.

The facility is a fraction of the size of the legacy operation designed for a different era, but it has the capacity to meet the company’s needs.

“A number of our peers have made the decision to outsource their print operations to locations outside of their city. We did not want to do that. And we’re fortunate that we have the opportunity to stay in North Texas,” Murray said.

“We will continue to print seven days a week while many newspapers across the country no longer do so,” Murray said. “Reading the printed newspaper is a daily habit for our readers, and we want to continue to give them what they want.”

Grant Moise, The News’ publisher and the chief executive officer of DallasNews, said the company’s commitment remains the same.

“We have continued to produce a premier print product that reflects our dedication to quality journalism. With this decision, we will be better positioned to do so profitably,” Moise said.

The transition will take about eight months to complete and will include a 60% staff cut, Murray said.

Employees at the printing plant were informed Tuesday of the changes and job losses.

The long-tenured staff is being offered severance pay. The new plant will run with 60% fewer employees.

The cost of the press including installation is expected to be $8 million. The company has enough cash to fund the new plant, Murray said.

The Plano plant was built in the early 1980s and expanded in 1992, the year The Dallas Morning News was the No. 1 newspaper in the nation in total full-run advertising.

The location is one of the few large parcels left in Plano.

It’s across West Plano Parkway from John Paul II High School and about a mile north of the President George Bush Turnpike.

The property is zoned light industrial and that includes new popular uses such as data centers, Murray said.

According to the Collin County Appraisal District, the land is worth more than the building.

The parcel at 3900 W. Plano Parkway is valued on the tax rolls at $12.58 million and the building at $6.53 million.

Freedom Center’s final edition

Massive plant that prints Chicago Tribune makes last production run Bodo Stolczenberger, a plate room technician, records newsprint traveling through a press during the last Freedom Center press run of the Chicago Tribune on Saturday.

Stolczenberger posts videos to a Facebook group of current and former Chicago Tribune press operators. Vincent Alban/Chicago Tribune Photos Terry Ford, a day shift press supervisor, gives a tour of the Chicago Tribune Freedom Center to his daughter, Nicole Ford, and his wife, Anne Ford, before the last Freedom Center press run of the Chicago Tribune on Saturday. He started as a part-timer at the Freedom Center in 1983.

By Robert Channick Chicago Tribune

When the heavily used presses at the Freedom Center geared up over the weekend to print the Sunday Chicago Tribune, it gave new meaning to the term final edition.

After 43 years of spewing out countless millions of newspapers, the production run was the last for the Chicago Tribune at the massive plant along the Chicago River.

The largest newspaper printing plant in North America is coming down. Chicago’s first casino will go up in its place.

Downsizing to a suburban facility, the Tribune will print on. But the imminent demise of the Freedom Center marks the end of an era, as newspaper circulation declines turn once-bustling printing plants into the buggy whip factories of the digital age.

Freedom Center is being demolished to make way for a planned Bally’s Chicago Casino complex.

Tribune Publishing is moving its printing operations to the northwest suburban Daily Herald plant, a smaller but newer facility it purchased in May 2023 for an undisclosed price.

The Monday edition of the Chicago Tribune will be the first in the newspaper’s storied 177-year history not printed in Chicago, bearing instead a made-in-Schaumburg imprimatur.

“It’s kind of bittersweet,” said Scott LaBadie, 55, of South Holland, a 32-year Freedom Center veteran press operator working the night shift Saturday. “I have the ironic duty of doing the last edition here at the Freedom Center, and tomorrow, I have the pleasure of doing the first edition in Schaumburg.”

LaBadie was one of about a dozen press operators on duty for the emotional final run of the Chicago Tribune at the Freedom Center. Many were wearing old-school pressman’s hats made out of newspapers and custom T-shirts featuring the grim reaper marking the end of the printing plant itself.

They were scheduled to print 160,000 copies of the Sunday Chicago Tribune and 49,000 copies of the Sunday Chicago-Sun-Times, both of which would be moving over to the Schaumburg plant for the Monday editions.

In addition, the crew was printing 25,000 copies of The New York Times, which is scheduled to run for two more weeks at the Freedom Center before shifting to Schaumburg.

If all went well, they would be wrapping it up at midnight, but multiple mechanical problems threatened to make it a long night.

After starting the Tribune at 9 p.m., one of two presses dedicated to the run flashed an oil warning light and had to be shut down.

The press handling the Sun-Times, which was scheduled to begin its run at 11 p.m., developed electrical problems and was in danger of being delayed. The New York Times press also experienced some glitches.

“We run until it’s done,” LaBadie said.

Eventually, all the balky presses got going, and the Chicago Tribune completed its final Freedom Center run at 12:48 a.m. on Sunday.

The dingy swan song was a long way from the glory days at Freedom Center, when all the presses would be humming, tended by dozens of operators, printing more than a million copies of the Sunday Chicago Tribune alone.

“For more than four decades, the Freedom Center has played a pivotal role for the Chicago Tribune,” said Par Ridder, the newspaper’s general manager. “However, it was built in and for a different time. Now, we look forward to moving to a modern production facility in Schaumburg, which is a better fit for our current and future needs.”

Like the Tribune Tower before it, the newspaper’s century-old neo-Gothic landmark which was sold in 2016 and converted to condos, the Freedom Center is another monument to print journalism falling by the wayside in the digital media age.

Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Freedom Center was built in 1981, a brawny edifice staking turf on 30 acres of industrial land in River West.

The 700,000-square-foot plant featured 10 new Goss Metroliner offset presses, each of which cost upward of $10 million and could print 75,000 144-page newspapers an hour. It was a huge step up from the cramped basement operation at Tribune Tower, which ceded all printing to Freedom Center in September 1982.

“The Freedom Center was a physical manifestation of the muscularity and influence of the Tribune at the time,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.

A former Tribune reporter and editor who started at the newspaper in 1982, Franklin remembered the pride that swept across the newsroom as the Freedom Center launched full production, a facility unrivaled in the industry.

Named in a contest by former Tribune reporter Casey Bukro, the Freedom Center became the whirring engine of Chicago journalism, where upward of a million newspapers would be printed and distributed each day, landing on driveways, doorways and retail shelves before dawn across a waking city.

While the state-of-the-art Freedom Center was a breath of fresh air compared with the dank subterranean printing operation at Tribune Tower, the tenure at the stand-alone River West plant was not without labor strife.

In 1985, 1,000 union production workers went on strike as their positions changed amid the new printing technology. Many never returned during the multiyear walkout after the Tribune hired replacements for the striking workers.

At the dawn of the new millennium, Chicago Tribune weekday print circulation averaged about 600,000 and topped 1 million on Sunday. Geographically zoned editions made the voluminous runs even more complex, keeping all 10 presses and scores of operators busy 24/7.

In 2002, Freedom Center expanded to 940,000 square feet, even as digital competition began to grow, increasing capacity for the still robust Tribune circulation, and enabling the plant to continue to build its commercial business.

Even the rival Sun-Times decided to stop its own presses in 2011, shuttering its 12-year-old printing plant on South Ashland Avenue and outsourcing the work to Tribune’s Freedom Center.

But in recent years, the rise of digital media precipitated a rapid erosion in print circulation, slowing production at Freedom Center and permanently retiring four of its 10 aging presses as demand for daily newspapers waned.

By 2023, Tribune print circulation had fallen to 73,000 on weekdays and 172,000 on Sunday, a 75% decline over the past decade, according to the latest data from the Alliance for Audited Media.

Excess capacity made the Freedom Center expendable for Tribune Publishing, which also lost its lease on an increasingly valuable piece of real estate under a succession of owners.

Tribune Media, the former broadcast parent of Tribune Publishing, kept all the real estate — including Tribune Tower and Freedom Center — when the newspaper company spun off on its own in 2014. Nexstar Media Group acquired Freedom Center as part of its $4.1 billion purchase of Tribune Media in 2019. Bally’s became Tribune Publishing’s landlord in November 2022 when it bought the Freedom Center site from Nexstar Media for $200 million.

Last year, Bally’s agreed to pay Tribune Publishing $150 million to vacate the Freedom Center by July 5 to break ground on the casino complex, which is slated to open in September 2026.

In recent years, newspapers across the country have closed, consolidated and outsourced production amid dramatically declining print circulation.

The Los Angeles Times, a former sister paper to the Chicago Tribune, shuttered its sprawling 34-year-old downtown printing plant in March, farming out the work to the Southern California News Group in Riverside, nearly 60 miles away.

“There was this time when Freedom Center was part of a trend of building these off-site, ginormous stand-alone printing and distribution facilities,” Franklin said. “But most of those facilities have now been shut down around the country. And it’s much more efficient and much less expensive to produce news on pixels than it is on paper.”

The Freedom Center will wrap up all production June 2 with the final editions of The Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

But Tribune is staying in the newspaper printing business, trading the Freedom Center for the 21-year-old Daily Herald plant on 21 acres by the Elgin-O’Hare Expressway.

The Schaumburg plant has two German-made Manroland presses, which have been resized to match the current Tribune print format.

A handful of press operators have already moved over to the Schaumburg plant, which has been printing the Life & Travel, Arts & Entertainment, Comics and Real Estate sections in the Sunday Chicago Tribune for several weeks.

Most of the Tribune’s commercial clients will also migrate to Schaumburg, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Sun-Times, with the Daily Herald added to the roster as part of the plant purchase.

Commercial printing remains a profit center for the company, Ridder said.

“The commercial print and delivery business has been a solid business for Chicago Tribune for a long time, and I expect it to continue to be,” Ridder said.

A significant number of Freedom Center production employees, however, will not be going to Schaumburg.

While Tribune declined to say how many production employees remain at Freedom Center, the company laid off nearly 200 packaging workers in April, outsourcing weekly advertising inserts to a facility in Milwaukee ahead of the move to the smaller Schaumburg site.

For many long-tenured press operators, who toiled for decades in the windowless bowels of the factory to print the daily first draft of history, it is also the end of the production line.

Of the roughly 40 press operators working this spring at Freedom Center, about a dozen have committed to move to Schaumburg, according to Terry Ford, 64, of River Grove, a 41-year plant veteran who serves as crew supervisor.

Ford is among those retiring in June — nearly three years earlier than planned — mostly to avoid the commute to the northwest suburbs. “You’ve got to understand,” said Ford. “You’ve got tolls going out there now, the raises haven’t been forthcoming and you’ve got an aging workforce.”

Rick Ramirez, 61, of Hammond, a journeyman press operator who just completed his 25th year at Freedom Center, said it will be his last year as a Tribune employee after opting out of the move to Schaumburg.

Instead, Ramirez, who works the overnight shift, is planning a cross-country Route 66 road trip with his wife and then will try to find another path in an unexpected late-career detour.

“I actually thought this was going to be my last job ever,” said Ramirez. “But unfortunately, I’m going to have to start another chapter in my life.”

As printing operations shift to Schaumburg, the Chicago Tribune is also closing its Freedom Center newsroom May 31. The company has leased 3,700 square feet in the historic Brooks Building at 223 W. Jackson Blvd. in the Loop, with plans to move editorial operations there by July 1, according to Ridder.

Booted from its namesake tower in 2018, this will be the fourth location in six years for the peripatetic Tribune newsroom.

On Wednesday and Thursday, Tribune will hold an online auction for everything from printing equipment, dump trucks and forklifts to historical newspapers and press plates in a Freedom Center final liquidation.

The 10 printing presses, once the beating heart of Freedom Center, will essentially be sold for parts and scrapped, Ridder said. “There just isn’t a market for that stuff,” Ridder said.

Freedom Center will give way to an entertainment complex including an exhibition hall, hotel, theater, restaurants and perhaps fittingly, a massive windowless casino building with 4,000 gaming positions at the center.

While the printing center will soon be relegated to the history books, a very small version of the Freedom Center will live on.

Horace Nowell, 27, who used to bike to Freedom Center as a child to watch freight trains deliver huge rolls of paper to the plant, spent five years building a scale model layout of the industrial site.

The painstakingly realistic model includes everything from the detailed plant emblazoned with the Chicago Tribune logo to authentic graffiti-laden boxcars navigating the grounds.

Completed when Nowell was a 21-year-old Loyola University student in 2018, the model was on display in the printing plant’s lobby for 18 months. Nowell now keeps it in his Lakeview apartment.

“It was definitely a full-circle moment to have it on display in the actual building,” Nowell said.

With the Freedom Center about to fall to the wrecking ball, Nowell would like to see his model back on display at a museum, or perhaps inside the successor casino.

Meanwhile, at the Freedom Center finale, a gaggle of Tribune reporters and editors crashed the proceedings Saturday night bearing congratulatory signs to bid the press operators farewell, and to thank them for putting their words on paper every day on deadline.

Former Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose latest story graced the front page of the final Tribune printed at the Freedom Center, felt moved to be among them.

“It’s historic to me, the idea that this huge building that represented so much about Chicago and about newspapering, is about to vanish,” said Schmich, one of 40 journalists to accept a buyout three years ago upon hedge fund Alden Global Capital’s acquisition of Tribune Publishing.

For the print operators themselves, it was an emotional night at work, at times celebratory, at times teary-eyed.

Cris Afante, 65, who started at the Freedom Center in 1985, was press crew supervisor on the final run of the Chicago Tribune at the plant. He will be heading to Schaumburg on June 2, but most of his crew will not be there.

“It’s just sad, because for a lot of these people, this is their other family,” said Afante. “We grew old together here. You can’t help but get attached to these guys after all those years.”

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