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.
The decision to shut the outlets coincides with a steep nationwide decline in newspaper readership that has contributed to the closure of more than 3,200 papers in the United States since 2005, according to the Local News Initiative at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. (The Jersey Journal, which for 157 years has been based in New Jersey’s most densely populated county, was selling just 2,600 papers a day.)
But The Ledger’s demise also leaves New Jersey with what researchers say is the distinction of being only the second state in the country to have its primary paper move completely online. In 2023, The Ledger’s parent company similarly stopped printing a statewide newspaper in Alabama as it beefed up its Pulitzer Prize-winning online news site there.
Since 2005, New Jersey has lost 129 papers, or 58 percent of its print options — more than any state other than Maryland, according to Zachary Metzger, director of Medill’s State of Local News Project. About 3,650 newspaper jobs have disappeared in the past decade, he said.
The decline is often felt in intangible ways.
“The danger is not just the loss of accountability reporting,” Mr. Metzger said. “Local news organizations also serve as a glue that binds a community together.”
“It’s where a community sees itself,” he added. “It’s a running archive of history that is going to be lost and is being lost.”
For decades, The Ledger had a statewide reach and extraordinary clout, particularly among lawmakers in Trenton, the capital.
“The Ledger would write something on a Sunday and all the newspapers would follow for the rest of the week,” said Peter J. McDonough Jr., a close aide to former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman. “They called out the B.S.”
Leaders from NJ Advance Media, which operates The Ledger’s online site, NJ.com, have said that the transition to a solely online news outlet will allow them to invest more heavily in digital news.
“People are nostalgic and upset,” said Steve Alessi, president of NJ Advance Media. “You’re losing something. We totally understand that.
“The industry is changing,” he added, “but we feel like we’re leading it, and we’re leading it for the right reasons because we want to maintain that high journalistic bar.”
NJ.com, he noted, employs more journalists today than it did a year ago and is hiring.
Christopher Kelly, vice president of content for NJ Advance Media, said it would be foolish not to serve readers in the location many already prefer: online.
“As we think about where to put our resources, our newsroom resources, it’s also about listening to what the audience is telling us they want more of,” Mr. Kelly said.
In 2005, nearly 600,000 households bought The Ledger on Sundays, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. By 2023, Sunday circulation had plummeted to roughly 86,000. When it announced two months ago that it planned to stop printing on Feb. 2, the company noted that its circulation had dropped by an additional 21 percent last year.
By comparison, Mr. Alessi said NJ.com gets 15.2 million clicks a month, including many for stories that are accessible without a paid subscription.
The closures come at an especially pivotal moment in New Jersey, a 9.5-million person state known for its brass-knuckle politics.
Bruising races for governor and Jersey City mayor loom, the cost of living remains extraordinarily high and edicts from President Trump put the state’s estimated 475,000 undocumented immigrants at risk of deportation.
Steven Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City and a Democratic candidate for governor, said the loss of The Ledger and The Jersey Journal was devastating. He said he most feared a diminution of aggressive government and political coverage.
“It’s going to change elections and campaigns in meaningful ways,” he said. “The accountability that it created over time will be gone.”
In its prime, The Ledger was instrumental in ginning up support for construction of the Meadowlands Sports Complex, where the World Cup final will be played next year. It won its first Pulitzer in 2001 for photography after a deadly Seton Hall University dormitory fire. It won a second Pulitzer in 2005 for its coverage of Gov. Jim McGreevey’s resignation after he announced he was gay and had had an extramarital affair with a male staff member.
But to many former reporters and columnists, news of its end came as an unsurprising, if brutal, blow.
In 2008, roughly 40 percent of its journalists took buyouts, and in January 2024, the Ledger stopped publishing on Saturdays.
“The paper I mourn died a long time ago,” said Mark Di Ionno, a former editor and columnist who plans to be among more than 100 Ledger journalists, past and present, who are expected to gather Sunday night in Newark to commemorate the final print edition.
Jim Willse, a former Ledger editor, noted that scores of skilled journalists remain at NJ.com. He said he expected the outlet to maintain its tradition of muscular and provocative reporting.
Still, he said, the paper’s end was as sad as it was inevitable.
“The print product had a certain personality — a character that no online news product can duplicate,” said Mr. Willse, who is retired.
“There is something magical about seeing your kid’s picture on a printed page. You send it to Aunt Edna. You put it on a refrigerator door,” he added, “and that does go away.
“But I think at the end of the day, Aunt Edna may care more about that printed page than the 15-year-old kid pictured does. That’s just the way of the world.”
If there is a silver lining in New Jersey’s bleak news landscape, it is the growth of nonprofit and digital news sites, many of which operate without a paywall.
New Jersey has 130 network digital sites — by far the most in the country, with 43 more than in New York, which is in second place, according to Mr. Metzger, of Medill.
Janet Bamford, of the New Jersey School Boards Association, said these sites are a key way in which meetings continue to be covered in many parts of the state. “I have to say they’ve done a good job,” Ms. Bamford said.
The abrupt closure of the Newhouse family’s five New Jersey newspapers has also prompted a crisis over an arcane, but crucial, duty of local government: the requirement that legislative activities and pending development projects be publicized in printed legal ads.
The Legislature adopted a temporary fix that permits communities with a defunct newspaper to purchase legal ads through the paper’s online news site. Lawmakers are expected to try to craft a more permanent solution this month.
Lobbyists for counties, school boards and the state’s nearly 600 cities and towns are pressing for permission to publish legal ads on their own websites — a step that would deprive news organizations of a longstanding source of revenue.
Opponents of that effort question whether elected leaders should have full control of ads that sometimes provide the only public disclosure of prospective development projects, which can be lucrative for builders and towns, but deeply unpopular among residents.
“The point is: Do you really want the government policing itself in New Jersey?” said Mark Magyar, a former reporter and State Senate staff member who now runs a public policy center at Rowan University.
Nancy Lane, who leads the Local Media Association, which represents thousands of print, digital and broadcast news outlets, said she was certain the decision to stop publishing the state’s paper of record was “gut-wrenching” for everyone involved.
“If they can use some of those dollars to grow their digital audience to expand their impact — this could be a good thing,” she said. “The Star-Ledger isn’t alone and there will be others to follow. And it is sad.”