Valley’s largest newspaper company outsourcing McAllen printing to Reynosa, layoffs hit press staff

AIM Media Texas, the owner of the southernmost printing press in Texas, began outsourcing print operations to Reynosa in early September, about four months after announcing an impending sale of The Monitor building in McAllen to the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

AIM Media owns the Rio Grande Valley’s most prominent newspapers — The Monitor, The Brownsville Herald, and the Valley Morning Star — and prints many other South Texas publications.

UTRGV purchase still pending

In May, the University of Texas Board of Regents authorized UTRGV to purchase The Monitor’s 88,970-square-foot building, which sits on about 10 acres of land at 1400 E. Nolana Ave.

According to UTRGV, that sale hasn’t closed yet.

First time The Monitor printed outside McAllen

On Monday, Chairman and CEO of AIM Media Management Jeremy Halbreich said the company began transitioning printing operations to a press in Reynosa in early September in preparation for an office move, a printing transition that started with The Monitor.

That was likely the first time The Monitor was ever printed outside of McAllen in its more than 116-year history.

A press once heralded, now scrapped

AIM’s current press started printing at The Monitor’s headquarters in 2004. Its owners described it at the time as a state-of-the-art machine.

That once heralded press will be scrapped imminently.

“There is absolutely no market for newspaper presses, certainly (not) such as the one that we have. So once the outsourcing is complete, we will very quickly begin that other process,” Halbreich said.

Layoffs hit local press staff

The change will result in pressroom and mailroom employees at AIM losing their jobs.

Halbreich said they’ve been offered a “very attractive severance package.”

“So we’re handling it in the only way we know how to do it, which is with a lot of care, attention, and concern. There are some wonderful longtime employees, and we’re handling this whole transition appropriately,” he said.

Customers and commercial work

AIM’s out-of-house commercial printing customers may continue to print through the company.

“Again, we’ve been communicating this with them well in advance. This is nothing new to them. We’ve been talking to them for a while already,” Halbreich said.

Halbreich couldn’t say definitively which Reynosa press AIM is using, referring questions to Stephan Wingert, AIM Media Texas regional vice president, who hasn’t responded to multiple requests for comment on the change. Halbreich did say that AIM is switching to a family-owned press with which Wingert has developed a good relationship.

Fewer presses, fewer print days

Printing presses have become increasingly scarce.

In 2023, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times shuttered its press after 139 years and outsourced printing to Houston, following the lead of other newspaper presses.

“We could have sent out newspapers to Houston to be printed. We could have sent them to San Antonio. We probably could have sent them to Bryan-College Station,” Halbreich said. “But those are all significantly further away than right across the border in Reynosa.”

AIM has said for years it’s gearing its publications toward an online audience.

In 2023, it cut physical print editions at its three flagship Valley papers down from seven days to five, a number that dropped to just two within months.

Readers unlikely to notice

Halbreich said the closure of the press shouldn’t affect readers.

“For people who are intimately aware of the business — such as you, such as me — all the people I will refer to as ‘insiders,’ there is no question that it is emotional and highly bittersweet,” he said. “But for our average reader, for our average viewer — and don’t forget, we have multiple times more viewers online today than we have subscribers and readers who look at the print product — it’s a total non-event.

“They didn’t know when it was printed when they started subscribing, and they still don’t know where it’s printed,” he said. “All they know is if they want a print product, it’s available, and if they choose to just read it online, it’s also available, obviously.”