The Times-Standard Has Moved From Its Big Sixth Street Edifice to an Office Downtown

930 Sixth Street, the longtime — now former — home of the Times-Standard. | Photos by Andrew Goff.

###

A couple weeks ago, the staff of the Times-Standard, Humboldt County’s enduring daily newspaper of record, picked up stakes and moved across town, decamping from the publication’s longtime home inside the Brutalist edifice at 930 Sixth Street and heading a half-mile west to 39 Fifth Street.

This marks the first time the publication has moved shop in more than 50 years. As the paper’s hyphen hints, there were once two competing periodicals — the Humboldt Times (established in 1854) and the Humboldt Standard (1875) — which joined forces in 1967 and moved into the Sixth Street building the following year.

“The move was bittersweet for some Eurekans,” the T-S recounted in a former version of its “About Us” page. “The paper’s new site had been the location of the Sumner Carson mansion, built in 1914, which had been for sale for years.”

No takers, sadly, and so the mansion was torn down and this big concrete box, designed by Lockwood Greene Engineers, was built in its place — construction cost: $2.5 million.

The architectural style may reflect the industrial vogue of the time (Lockwood Greene designed many newspaper buildings like it around the country), but that’s not exactly a compliment. Reporters long referred to their windowless second-floor confines as “the news tomb.” The most attractive element of the structure is probably the ivy vines that crawled up its western face until they were removed a few years back.

Rich Somerville, the editor of the paper when I got hired as a copy editor and page designer in 2007, once mused, “This is an art town. Maybe what we need on Sixth Street is some dynamic art work. Maybe a painting of a view out a window.”

He also remarked, “No doubt affection for the place will come with time.” Well, it never did for me — not for the building, anyway. But I do have fond memories of my time within it. Improbably, Humboldt County was home to a good old-fashioned newspaper war back then, with the venerable T-S going head-to-head with Rob Arkley’s upstart Eureka Reporter.

In 2008 I moved to the other side of the news tomb, where I joined a crack team of eight reporters in a bustling, fluorescent-hued newsroom some 22 employees strong. I dug up a web cache of the Times-Standard‘s “Contact Us” page from September 2008. It lists 68 employees, including editors, photographers and quite a few folks who worked in departments — production, creative services, accounting — that no longer exist locally.

The invigorating competition provided by the Reporter vanished when the paper folded in November 2008. And like many other local newspapers across the country, the Times-Standard has been hit hard in the intervening years by a variety of forces buffeting the industry — from Craigslist and social media gobbling up classified and advertising revenue, respectively, to changing reader habits. (Hello, folks reading this on your phones.)

A recent story in the Atlantic examined another factor — namely, the insidious greed of Alden Global Capital, “a secretive hedge fund that has quickly, and with remarkable ease, become one of the largest newspaper operators in the country.”

Digital First Media, a subsidiary of Alden, now owns dozens of dailies, including the Denver Post, the San Jose Mercury News and, alas, the Times-Standard.

“The [Alden] model is simple,” writes McKay Coppins in the Atlantic. “Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self.”

The Times-Standard building went on the market in 2014 with a price tag of $2 million. Today, the paper’s newsroom staff is down to just five. The first job I did for the paper — page layout — is now performed down in Chico, which is also where the paper gets printed before being trucked up to Humboldt overnight for distribution.

But the newsroom staff, to their credit, keep churning out local news stories for new editions published six days a week. They just hired a new reporter. (Welcome, Jackson Guilfoil!) And now they have fresh digs.

The paper’s new home, at the corner of Fifth and B, is a two-story wood-and-stucco building with a pair of swinging saloon-style doors. In an Oct. 23 note announcing the move, T-S Publisher John Richmond gamely remarked, “You know what? I like it. It fits us perfectly … .”

Best of all? No painting of a view out a window required.

###

CORRECTION: This post originally said the Times-Standard’s layout is being done overseas. Former editor Marc Valles says it’s being done in Chico and we believe him.