Chicago Tribune Now Outsourcing Print

When the heavily-used presses at the Freedom Center geared up over the weekend to print the Sunday Chicago Tribune, it gave new meaning to the term final edition. After 43 years of spewing out countless millions of newspapers, the production run was the last for the Chicago Tribune at the massive plant along the Chicago River.

The largest newspaper printing plant in North America is coming down. Chicago’s first casino will go up in its place.

Downsizing to a suburban facility, the Tribune will print on. But the imminent demise of the Freedom Center marks the end of an era, as newspaper circulation declines turn once-bustling printing plants into the buggy whip factories of the digital age.

Freedom Center is being demolished to make way for a planned Bally’s Chicago Casino complex. Tribune Publishing is moving its printing operations to the northwest suburban Daily Herald plant, a smaller but newer facility it purchased in May 2023 for an undisclosed price.

The Monday edition of the Chicago Tribune will be the first in the newspaper’s storied 177-year history not printed in Chicago, bearing instead a made-in-Schaumburg imprimatur.

“It’s kind of bittersweet,” said Scott LaBadie, 55, of South Holland, a 32-year Freedom Center veteran press operator working the night shift Saturday. “I have the ironic duty of doing the last edition here at the Freedom Center, and tomorrow, I have the pleasure of doing the first edition in Schaumburg.”