Will Campbell: Newsprint maker plant's closure won't hit us hard

The Columbian published a wire story last Saturday about a newsprint maker in Longview that is shutting down. With the North Pacific Paper Co.'s closure, it will leave only one newspaper mill left in the United States, in Spokane.

A reader emailed me asking what effect it will have on us at The Columbian. In short, not much overall. I don't expect the closure to even be noticed by customers. The price of newsprint may increase in the future, but it accounts for a fraction of The Columbian's operating costs. But we do print a lot and use a lot of paper, and the market for it is experiencing a shortage.

In addition to printing The Columbian five days a week, we print 70 other publications on our two presses here in downtown Vancouver. While our presses are busier than ever, the closure of the Longview plant will not have much effect, mostly because we didn't buy its paper. Sometimes we buy paper from Canada, but we mostly buy the Spokane Valley-made blank newspaper rolls from a company called Inland Empire Paper.

I visited that facility in 2018, when I worked at the Spokesman-Review. I've seen how the newspaper is made, and it's incredible. The plant receives trucks of wood chips and shavings that are a by-product of lumber mills and makes the newspaper out of that. The machine that makes, dries and rolls the paper is massive and loud. There's a video linked in the online version of this story to see it in action.

Prices for these rolls of newspaper are expected to rise over time. For now, they're fluctuating up and down quite a bit for us here at The Columbian. We're planning to handle the predicted shortage of newsprint, and I don't expect any issues that customers will see. The worst-case realistic scenario would be having to pare down the paper a few pages each day.

Our production team receives calls weekly from other press managers in the Northwest asking to buy our blank newsprint. But we need all we can get to ride out the shortage.

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This story was originally published April 25, 2026 at 7:10 AM.