San Francisco Chronicle presses stopped

Stop the presses.

The San Francisco Chronicle got out of the newspaper printing business today after more than a century of producing the paper in-house, shifting tonight's production to new presses in Fremont owned and operated by Canada's Transcontinental Inc.

Faced with aging presses and strapped for cash to replace them, the move will significantly cut costs at a paper that lost $50 million in 2008, and allow it to focus on news gathering, Publisher Frank Vega said. The new presses, he said, will also enable The Chronicle to deliver high-quality color reproduction that is unparalleled in the newspaper industry.

"Our presses are about 50 years old," Vega said. "Several years ago we made a conscious decision that we need to be in the news and information business, and that printing was better left to professional commercial printers."

The shift means the paper will be able to print magazine-quality photos on crease-free pages.

It comes amid an industrywide downturn that has seen readers and advertisers migrate to the Internet. It also marks the end of an era for the paper's pressmen.

That working tradition at the paper, often passed from generation to generation, began not long after the first Daily Dramatic Chronicle was churned out on hand-cranked presses in 1865. In-house printing had been interrupted only briefly, including after the 1906 earthquake, when flames torched the Chronicle building and production shifted to Oakland, and again during a 52-day strike in 1968 when the paper was cobbled together by typesetting it in pieces and pasting it onto office paper.

More than 200 union workers - press operators and related staff- are losing their jobs as The Chronicle's Union City printing plant closes down.

Paper signs were taped beside the entrance to the plant, telling workers to turn in their badges to security.

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