Still going

A15.

That was the last page of The Herald-Mail that I laid out that will be printed at the Frederick News-Post.

Our company has found it cheaper and more flexible for us to print our newspaper in Mechanicsburg, Pa., on the presses of the Patriot-News. The press here in Hagerstown was removed a few years ago, a casualty of expensive repairs and too few parts.

I've witnessed newspaper transitions before. I've watched computer systems evolve... and devolve. I've watched printing presses stop printing forever. I've watched entire jobs be outsourced and centralized.

You'd think I'd be used to it.

In some sense, I am. The new deadlines brought on by the switch — they're a lot earlier — have caused me some consternation, but not the gut-churning borne by others in the newsroom.

Our publisher has said that the reader knows we, as a printed product, must "close the gate" once every 24 hours. We'll just be closing the gate earlier. The content will be in the paper, just on a different cycle, he said.

He's right.

Sure, people can visit our website, but not everyone does, particularly the older generation. And we're the only game in town when it comes to detailed stories about the happenings in Washington County, Md., and beyond. Television will parachute in, and even then, they'll only gloss over the story.

In other words, our product still has value to a significant group of customers.

But here's why I am feeling a little uneasy. It's not because of the here-and-now of this printing change. It's because of the dramatic shifts I've seen in the industry since I started 15 years ago.

It seems as though things have accelerated faster in the news business over that decade and a half than they had in the previous 30 years combined.

The Internet, social media, smart phones and tablets have led to the "digital first" philosophy. More news outlets will follow that path as their print readers shift their habits — or die.

I wish I could say that A15 had some ground-breaking story or really cool layout on it, to help mark the last time I put a page into the FTP program (called CyberDuck, by the way).

But it didn't.

Probably 80 percent of the page was advertising, leaving me enough room to run the weekly best-sellers list, printed Thursdays in Publishers Weekly, and an Associated Press story about how one of the Fiats used by Pope Francis on his visit to Philadelphia was sold at auction for $82,000 (the money benefited various Catholic charities).

Then again, books and the Catholic Church have had to weather many storms over the decades and centuries, even as the times have changed.

And they're still going.