By Saki Kambe
Terry Ward, the Vice President of Sound Publishing and the Publisher of Peninsula Daily News commented on the possibility of a printing press coming back to Port Angeles.
“We have not made any concrete decisions yet, we are exploring the possibilities. If we make a decision to put the printing press back in the Port Angeles area, it would happen probably early 2020,” Ward said.
Should Sound Publishing bring the printing press back to Port Angeles, it would print Peninsula Daily News, Sequim Gazette and several newspapers from Kitsap to Grays Harbor. It would possibly print commercial jobs as well.
Ward believes that the first obstacle that they run into is, logistically if a place where the printing press would be installed can support a new press. The printing press that was here before, back in pre-2011, was smaller, and it was located inside the main Peninsula Daily News building in downtown Port Angeles.
Ward mentioned that they are exploring two options. One would be putting it in the Peninsula Daily News main building as it used to be, and another option is to put it in its warehouse building, which is where Storm King CrossFit currently has its business.
“Storm King CrossFit is moving out; they purchased a building. They’re in the process of remodeling it, and we expect them to be out by late summer. Once they’re out of the building, then we will start to evaluate it to see if it makes sense, and if it can carry the load and the weight of putting a press on the concrete floor in that building, ” Ward said.
He explained that ideally, the size of the Storm King Crossfit building is where they prefer to put it. However, Ward is afraid that if the building can’t hold the weight, it might very easily prevent them from moving forward with the project.
As for the job positions, Ward thinks that more than likely, they would run multiple shifts with three to four pressmen per shift as well as the complete mail room to run their new equipment.
“Naturally it will be the good thing for the community because anytime you’re going to bring in a piece of equipment like that as well as hire additional staff, it will allow us to contribute at a higher rate to the economic development of the community, ” Ward said.
“It’s always great when the community business like ours invest back into the community that we live in and serve in; it will allow us to add more jobs too.”
“Our goal is we put a printing press here would be to allow us to more effectively meet the needs of what our newspapers are, as well as our partner newspapers that we would press,” Ward said.