ALBUQUERQUE, NM (February 20, 2008) - Employees at The Albuquerque Tribune learned this morning that the 86-year-old newspaper will close after Saturday's edition comes off the press.
Editor Phill Casaus told the Tribune's 38 editorial employees at a staff meeting this morning that the six-month effort for owner E.W. Scripps Co. to sell the afternoon newspaper had failed.
The photography staff at the Tribune includes director of photography Mark Holm, picture editor Jeff Alexander, and photojournalists Erin Fredrichs, Steven St. John, Craig Fritz, and Michael Gallegos. Also Lillian Kelly shoots video for the Tribune's Web site. Holm, Fredrichs, St. John, Fritz, Gallegos, and Kelly are NPPA members.
Current and former photojournalists from the Tribune have put up an online gallery of some of their images, along with their first-person stories about working for a great photography newspaper. The presentation called "The Way We See It" is online here.
"We have the last three days of the paper pretty much lined up already," Holm said today. "Scripps announced back on August 28 that they were either going to sell us or shut us down, but ever since then we've operated with very little information about it. We went on over into 2008, and it's been a week-to-week thing up until this point. It was good that we had this much time to prepare, and that we've known this was coming. Every since we out that we're going to close, we wanted to get the last three days of the paper planned, especially the last day, so that it would be special and it would be ready to go."
After more than two decades in Albuquerque, Holm says that he'll probably be moving out of state. "I'm looking. I'm in conversations with a few different places. Various staffers have their plans, which may or may not include working at other newspapers."
Holm was at the Tribune for seven years, and for 16 years before that he was with the morning Albuquerque Journal. Originally from the Midwest, Holm previously worked at newspapers in Iowa and Illinois.
The Tribune was operating under a joint agreement with the city's morning paper, the Albuquerque Journal, and the attempt to sell the Tribune had been monitored by the U.S. Department of Justice. The two papers were allowed to share some business functions while maintaining separate newsrooms under the agreement.
In August 2007 Scripps, based in Cincinnati, OH, announced the newspaper would either be sold or closed. The Tribune says their circulation in 1988 was 42,000 daily but circulation last month was down to 9,600. Only one potential buyer stepped forward, two local public relations executives who announced on February 1 that they were unable to reach an agreement with Scripps.
The Tribune won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for Eileen Welsome's series "The Plutonium Experiment."
The country's remaining afternoon newspapers have been struggling for readers and facing declining circulation, rising costs, and increased competition even in small local markets. Two weeks ago another afternoon newspaper, The Capital Times in Madison, WI, announced that they were ceasing daily publication and moving primarily to the Internet with only two tabloid print products per week. The newspaper's staff didn't know that change was coming at all until the day the publisher and editor announced it at a morning meeting.
