In our Spotlight on Business report.

Local journalism takes a major blow this week.

On Wednesday, we learned the state's largest newspaper, The Star Ledger, will no longer be available in print as of February.

The decision to shut down the Montvale production facility comes amid rising costs and less demand for a printed paper.

And while that's not a surprise, it's disappointing for a paper with storied history in new Jersey.

But the news doesn't end there.

The ledger is also laying off its editorial board and other dailies like The Times of Trenton, the South Jersey times and the 100 and County Democrat will no longer be printed.

Arguably, though, the worst of it all.

The Jersey Journal, which has covered Hudson County news and politics for 157 years, is shutting down entirely.

For more on what this means for the state's media landscape, I'm joined by Stephanie Murray, director at the center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University.

Stephanie, thanks for talking today.

A lot of us are still trying to wrap our heads around what this is going to mean, especially for a place like Hudson County, known for political corruption, where we're not going to have a field of reporters dedicated specifically to news there anymore.

Yes.

That, to me, was really the biggest part of the announcement that hit me was the closing of the Jersey Journal, because there are some other small news organizations that operate Hudson County.

There's Hudson County View, there's, some lifestyle organizations like Hoboken Girl.

There are a few other small startups as well.

Size of culture, which is run out of Saint Peter's University, but nothing like the Jersey Journal and the Jersey Journal.

For, as you said, 150 plus years has been covering that.

That county.

And this will mean that there aren't people anymore at government meetings, at a lot of events happening in Jersey City and around the county.

And it's a really huge blow.

What type of news do we miss when we don't have the watchdogs of of the free press?

Looking at, you know, some of the mundane, which are government meetings.

Yep.

Some of the things that people will see, most immediately will be, just lack of coverage of mundane things like zoning decisions, township decisions, city decisions, even things as simple as when is leaf pickup or, what happened at the latest Board of Education meeting.

And then over time, that leads to a lot more.

Studies have shown that cities and towns and places in the United States that don't have access to local news consistently over time.

So higher levels of political corruption, people are less likely to engage civically.

Voting goes down.

It leads to a lot of other things.

Longer term.

And that's really what I'm most worried about.

And, you know, I think there's this is a moment to for entrepreneurs and other organizations like the new Jersey Civic Information Consortium, to really step up and figure out what can we do to prevent that from happening here in Hudson County?

Yeah.

And I should know, right, that other outlets are included, covers Hudson County, but none were dedicated in the way that the journal was.

And of course, 157 years.

Let me just shift gears.

I think the headline that really took, everyone was the Star-Ledger, the state's largest newspaper ending print publication.

Those reporters will continue their work online, but you'll no longer have that print paper.

We saw this coming.

Yeah.

Yes, yes, we saw that coming.

So I used to actually work for advance.

When they closed the Ann Arbor News in Michigan in 2009.

So I've been through this before.

I've lived in a community, and I was a reporter when our local news shut down or the print paper completely went away.

And it is really hard.

It's hard on a local level, and it's hard on a statewide level.

And that was 15 years ago.

Things are different now, but still, there is a portion of our population that really depends on having a printed newspaper.

That is especially true for ethnic and immigrant communities in our state.

And so even though we saw this coming, it's still going to hurt people.

And people are going to be looking for something else to fill that gap.

And I'm just hopeful that we can help show people that there are great online news sources, such as NJ Spotlight News, that you can turn to, and even show people how to use some of those online news sources.

Well, print goes away because print is not going to come back.

It's really becoming a niche product in media.

Yeah.

Very quickly.

What is the center doing?

In light of this and the ongoing work that you all have been doing to make sure that local media stays alive?

Well, we've got a lot of people in my inbox to be asking that question, and we're going to host a meeting in a couple of weeks gathering some stakeholders, across the state and throughout, people who work in local news and hopefully some folks who work at the Jersey Journal to talk about, the immediate impacts in Hudson County, but then also longer term.

And that will also include folks from the Civic Info Consortium.

I mentioned a few minutes ago, because we want to try to work together to see what we can do to help, help make this change the least harmful that it can be to our state.

Stephanie Murray, for us.

Steph, thank you so much for.