Shut-down of last press of its kind in Whatcom County reflects evolution in newspaper printing realities; The Lynden Tribune newspaper continues publication.
Updated Feb. 15, 2025
The ring of an alarm signals the start of a process largely unchanged in the Lynden Tribune press room over the past half-century. Wheels begin to churn spooled paper through a maze of rollers, sheet slicers and folding mechanisms, spitting out stacks of the familiar form of a four-fold newsprint publication at the end of the line.
This symphony of newsprint production — and the accompanying smell of newly-minted ink — played for the final time this week in Whatcom County.
“It’s the end of an era,” Lynden Tribune and Print Company General Manager Len VanderStelt said.
The Lynden publishing company has for many years run this last press of its kind in Whatcom County. The next closest press with newsprinting capabilities is housed at the Skagit Publishing Company office that prints the Skagit Valley Herald and a cacophony of other publications distributed throughout the region.
While the Lynden publisher has printed its own weekly Tribune and Ferndale Record, the monthly Sudden Valley News and outside publications until this week, other local publications including the Bellingham Herald and Cascadia Daily News were already being printed on the Skagit press and delivered north on their daily and weekly rotations. The Skagit press — or print houses even more far flung — will now absorb the publications that the Lynden press will no longer manage.
Up to four staff at the Lynden Tribune and Print Company are directly impacted by the change.
“That’s the hardest part,” VanderStelt said.
Press operator Don Park, the conductor of the now disbanded symphony, isn’t sure what’s next for his career. He has been working here since before he graduated from Lynden High School in 1998.
“Believe it or not, I didn’t have gray hair when I started here,” Park said.
Most of that intervening time he served as the press operator. That involved critiquing test prints, scaling stairs and manually adjusting knobs and levers to correct page alignment and color transfer as stories and ads filled fresh pages.
VanderStelt, a former longtime press operator turned general manager, said the intricacies of that dance are in large part driving the extinction of these types of printing machines. It requires a lot more work and produces a lot more waste to finesse the details of a page than newer, more automated presses like the one at Skagit Publishing Company in Mount Vernon.
Skagit’s press was introduced in 2008. It is equipped with technology that can assess and correct alignment and color content, requiring fewer human interventions at the machine and enabling most of the work to be pre-set using computer programming.
VanderStelt said that automation and the larger scale of that machine enable the Skagit press to work faster as well, with the ability to crank out 30,000 pages per hour compared to Lynden’s capacity for 10,000 per hour.
“I started as a web press operator here (at the Lynden Tribune) in 1977,” VanderStelt said while the press he’s known for 48 years whirred during the final printing of a monthly publication. “It is amazing how the newspaper world has changed.”
An evolving industry
As newspapers have increasingly struggled to staff newsrooms in an ever-evolving digital age, the trajectory for aging press rooms has also been clear.
“We’d be lying if we said we hadn’t seen the writing on the wall, in some ways,” Lynden Tribune and Print Company prepress manager Chad Williams said of the impending shutdown of the local printing press.
Machine operator Jimmy Cutter agreed. His job at the Lynden Tribune and Print Company is safe for now, with a steady stream of products still printed on the smaller, more automated machines he runs. But he has moved from publisher to publisher throughout his career as news-printing conditions changed, including when the Bellingham Herald pulled the plug on its printing press and he turned to Skagit Publishing Company for work.
“We’ve all seen the newspaper industry go like this,” Cutter said with a downsloping motion of his hand.
Printing presses are going offline as costs outpace revenues, and publications that continue to be printed are traveling farther distances to reach doorsteps and newsstands.
Lynden Tribune and Print Company President and Publisher Michael D. Lewis delivered news that that fate had come for the local press in a letter to producers of outside publications on Jan. 14. While the 24-day window during which the press remained online may seem short, the development wasn’t all that surprising to colleagues in the news business.
Lewis said in the letter that he was shutting down the press his family business owned and operated for 54 years “with deep sadness … It was a very difficult decision to make but the current economic situation just does not warrant the continued operation of the press,” he wrote.
Expenses weren’t disclosed, but have included massive rolls of newsprint paper shipped from the Spokane area, ink, metal plates used in the printing process, electricity and labor.
It’s generally more difficult for local businesses to keep afloat than chain newspapers with outside resources. Skagit Publishing Company, for example, has grown its position as a regional stronghold for print products since it was acquired in 2017 by Adams Publishing Group, a 19-state business that leverages regional hubs. The Lynden Tribune and Print Company, by contrast, has been locally owned and operated by the Lewis family since 1914.
As community newspapers struggle independently or are consolidated through organizations like Adams Publishing Group, McClatchy, Gannett Company and others, and printed publications rely on fewer presses like found at Skagit Publishing Company, the availability of paper-and-ink news for readers continues to shrink.
It’s rare now to find a daily newspaper that hasn’t eliminated print days. The Bellingham Herald, for example, shrank from seven print delivery days per week to six in 2019, and then down to just two delivery days as of 2023. Even the in-house Skagit Valley Herald reduced its print schedule from seven days per week to six in 2020, and then to five as of 2023. And Cascadia Daily News adopted this model of print less, post more when it launched in early 2022, opting for a once-weekly print schedule despite its name.
The Daily Herald serving the Everett area in Snohomish County is also, contrary to its name, no longer printed daily. It is printed five days per week.
In an increasingly interconnected society, it turns out local news is taking longer roads to get delivered.
“It’s a whole different world,” VanderStelt said.
— By Kimberly Cauvel