Tucson Citizen will cease print publication Saturday
TUCSON -- Arizona's oldest continuously published daily newspaper, the Tucson Citizen, will publish its final print edition Saturday after its owner, Gannett Co. gci, failed to find a buyer.
The closure makes Tucson the latest two-newspaper town to lose one of its dailies. The Citizen published in the afternoon while the Arizona Daily Star appears mornings.
The Citizen has struggled for years against the Star, a 117,000-circulation newspaper. During the Citizen's heyday in the 1960s, circulation was about 60,000, but it had fallen to 17,000.
Kate Marymont, Gannett's vice president for news, told the 138-year-old newspaper's staff Friday that the Citizen will continue with a website edition providing commentary and opinion but no news coverage. Gannett, the nation's largest newspaper company, also publishes USA TODAY and its website, USATODAY.com.
The joint operating agreement Gannett has with Lee Enterprises, which publishes the Arizona Daily Star, will end Saturday. The companies' business partnership, Tucson Newspapers, will continue outside the legal framework of a joint operating agreement, Marymont said.
Under the JOA, Lee and Gannett shared costs and profits from the two newspapers, with Tucson Newspapers Inc. (TNI) handling all non-editorial functions, from advertising to circulation.
Bob Dickey, president of Gannett's U.S. Community Publishing Division, said in a statement that TNI will print a Tucson Citizen editorial weekly in the Star to expand the reach of the Citizen's voice.
"Dramatic changes in our industry combined with the difficult economy — particularly in this region — means it is no longer viable to produce two daily printed newspapers in Tucson," Dickey said.
The Citizen is the latest casualty of a newspaper industry struggling to survive despite dwindling advertising revenue and heavy Internet competition. The battle has been especially tough in two-newspaper cities like Tucson.
Already this year, E.W. Scripps closed the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and Hearst stopped printing the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, making it a news online site. The Christian Science Monitor stopped daily publication in favor of a weekly print edition and daily online news.
On Thursday, the Ann Arbor News in Michigan said its last day of publication will be July 23.
Other major newspaper companies, including Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, have filed for bankruptcy protection.
Gannett announced in January that it would close the Citizen if it didn't find a buyer for certain assets by March 21.
Four days before the planned closing, Gannett said the Citizen would stay open while it negotiated with two interested buyers. Those talks proved unsuccessful.
"In the end, there were no buyers," Marymont told the Citizen staff.
She said Gannett would honor severance pay arrangements that had been announced in January. It was unclear how many of the Citizen's 65 employees would lose their jobs.
The Arizona Citizen was founded on Oct. 15, 1870, by John Wasson, a newspaper man from California, with behind-the-scenes help from Richard McCormick, the territory's governor and later territorial delegate to Congress.
The newpaper changed ownership several times over the next 100 years until Gannett bought it in 1976, just a few years after a U.S. Supreme Court case involving the Citizen led Congress to pass the Newspaper Preservation Act, which contained new rules for joint operating agreements, allowing competing newspapers to do business together. Gannett also changed the name to the Tucson Citizen.