The Star-Ledger's last print edition came out today, Feb 2, 2025 [View all]

A Storied Newspaper Prepares to Print Its Own Obituary
NY Times
Feb. 1, 2025

In its heyday, The Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s longtime paper of record, boasted the nation’s largest State House bureau, an enviable circulation and enough editorial clout to alter the trajectory of the region’s defining infrastructure projects and environmental preservation efforts.

Reporters were well paid and often remained at the paper throughout the arc of their careers, imbuing The Ledger’s news coverage with institutional memory and gravitas, even as its thick, zoned editions were crammed with mundane dispatches from the state’s quilt of tiny towns and big cities.

On Sunday, The Ledger’s nearly century-long run as New Jersey’s dominant newspaper will come to an end when it prints its final edition and shifts to an online-only format. Its editorial board will vanish, as will its clippable sports photos and pages of printed obituaries.

Its sister publication, The Jersey Journal, one of the earliest holdings in the Newhouse media family’s now-vast empire, will cease to exist in print or online, leaving Hudson County, N.J. — a hotbed for political corruption — without a daily newspaper. Three other affiliated papers, The Times of Trenton, The South Jersey Times and The Hunterdon County Democrat, will stop printing and offer only digital news.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/nyregion/new-jersey-star-ledger-prints-final-edition.html

I was a reporter in the Star-Ledger's Middlesex County bureau in the 1980s, a time when it was the 15th-largest newspaper in the U.S. Our mission was to cover everything that happened in our beats, and heaven forbid if we missed a story. If another paper had a story that you missed, you'd be ordered up to Newark for a savage tongue-lashing in front of the entire newsroom by Andy Stasiuk, one of the editors. I lived in dread of getting the Andy treatment and managed to avoid it by staying on top of everything I could. We were told to cover our circulation area like a blanket.

The Star-Ledger had some great years after I left to move out of NJ, but more recently it was a shadow of its former glory. And that is a very great pity, because nobody is covering the political events and happenings in the state's townships and boroughs. Nobody is there to keep an eye on things so the public stays informed.

Many newspapers in the US have ceased publication in the past few decades. Some have gone online, but what happens if the power goes out or if something happens to the internet? It's a scary thought.