El Paso Times To Print Newspaper In Juarez Now

The El Paso Times has been published in El Paso for over one hundred years. It was founded in 1881 and for one hundred and forty years it has been the newspaper of record in this dusty little west Texas town, but it's no secret that the Times is not what it once was, and some recent news about the paper shows that it never will be again.

The El Paso Times ran a story that announced that it would be moving their printing operation to Juarez. The paper is already running on about a handful of people here in town. The layout of the paper isn't even handled in El Paso anymore. The finished product you see, if you still buy a newspaper, is laid out by people in Arizona. In early October, the printing press that has run for decades will no longer put out the El Paso Times in El Paso, it will instead be printed in Mexico.

Why does that matter? Well, it's 140 years of history that will be silenced, for one thing. It's bad enough that the paper has fewer staff members than an average high school newspaper but now it won't even be printed in El Paso? I know that a lot of people read the Times online and that's great, but what happens when something of consequence happens, like the attacks on September 11, 2001? Or the Walmart massacre two years ago? We need a printed newspaper to turn to see photos of the good and bad times in our community and world. We need to go out and buy them and keep them for future generations. That is all but lost.

It's unlikely that this move will make for a better Times product. When this story hit social media so many people chimed in that they weren't getting their newspaper delivered to their homes for weeks and they were planning on cancelling the delivery. Newspapers are called the news of record for a reason. They are tangible. They can be reread by generations of people. They are hard and fast, not fleeting and easily forgotten like online words. It's a shame to see the slow death of our only daily printed newspaper. I'm sorry to see it happen.