The Kalamazoo Gazette will end its print run on Sunday, December 6, when MLive Media Group closes out the last of its eight Michigan newspapers in print, the company said Wednesday.
MLive Community President John Hiner framed the move as the "next step" in the publisher's digital evolution. The company says more than 99 percent of its readers now access its news online, and it said digital and online news subscribers surpassed print subscribers this year.
"This transition is dictated by our readers' overwhelming adoption of our news in digital formats," Hiner said.
The Kalamazoo Gazette is one of eight titles affected. The final printed editions, scheduled for delivery on December 6, also include the Ann Arbor News, the Bay City Times, the Flint Journal, the Grand Rapids Press, the Jackson Citizen Patriot, the Muskegon Chronicle, and the Saginaw News. All eight will continue afterward in digital formats, including MLive.com, the MLive app, online newspaper editions, social media, and email newsletters.
The shift is not expected to affect MLive's roughly 100 journalists, Hiner said. The company said the change will cost one full-time distribution job and will end relationships with contracted newspaper distributors. No job reductions are planned at the Ohio facility where the MLive newspapers have been printed since 2020.
MLive does not publicly release its circulation numbers but noted that, according to the Nieman Journalism Lab, its website draws more than 8 million monthly visits.
New York-based Advance Local owns MLive.com and consolidated its Michigan newspaper titles under the MLive umbrella in 2012. The Kalamazoo Gazette's lineage as a local paper stretches back more than 120 years.
For longtime residents of Kalamazoo, the decision closes a chapter on the daily habit of the printed edition. The Gazette's archive remains available through the Kalamazoo Public Library, which hosts a Gazette collection running from 1837 to the present, including full-color newspaper pages and digital-only content.
MLive said the final print edition on December 6 will be its last. The company expects its coverage of Kalamazoo and the region to continue, just online.