Appeal moving into new building

After five locations and 136 years operating in Carson City, the Nevada Appeal is about to reach another major turning point.

Carson City's daily newspaper has purchased a new 90,000-square-foot office and production facility at 580 Mallory Way.

By early next year, the building will house 100-plus employees from the Nevada Appeal and Tahoe-Carson Area Newspapers, as well as a new high-speed press designed to improve the company's production capacity.

Financial arrangements were not disclosed.

"It's a move we really needed to make," said Nevada Appeal Publisher Jeff Ackerman. "We are centralizing more of the operations for the six local papers and we need the space."

Tahoe-Carson Area Newspapers is owned by parent company Swift Newspapers, Inc. of Reno. The family-owned company also publishes the Minden/Gardnerville Record-Courier, Tahoe Daily Tribune in South Lake Tahoe, North Lake Tahoe Bonanza in Incline Village, Tahoe World in Tahoe City, and Truckee's Sierra Sun.

The company also produces specialty publications and operates the Tahoe.com and Reno.com Web sites.

The Mallory Way building was formerly occupied by Automotive Specialty Accessory Parts, Inc. It will replace the newspaper's current 23,000 square-foot office and printing facility at 200 Bath St.

The move requires the complicated installation of a new two-story press, as well as a remodel of existing office space. The Nevada Appeal will likely lease 25,000 square feet of the expansive warehouse, as well as 15,000 square feet of professional offices, to other businesses.

At its current location, installation of the new press, with its two 20-foot towers was impossible. The company's current Goss unit press dates to the 1970s.

"This press will be at least twice as fast and will give us more color capabilities," Ackerman said. "It's state of the art; everything is digital. With the current press, operators have to climb up and make manual adjustments to the ink flow.

"Those adjustments will be done with the touch of a screen."

Ackerman believes the investment will pay off with greater efficiency and reduced paper waste. Newsprint, the trade term for web press paper, constitutes the biggest expenditure for modern newspapers. Reducing spoilage, even by a small percentage, will help the company keep costs down.

For the expanded office space, Ackerman and Swift Newspaper executives envision centralized production operations for all six newspapers. Most of the newspapers' business and classified ad operations already operate in Carson City.

Bill Dolan, who worked for the Nevada Appeal in various capacities starting in the 1940s and continues to write a popular "Past Pages" column, remembers a time when several newspapers jockeyed to become Carson City's mainstay.

"They had, at one time, three or four newspapers down there," he said, referring to the Second and Carson streets location. "It was known as newspaper row."

During Dolan's time, which included several of the paper's relocations, the Nevada Appeal was the first newspaper on the West Coast to employ an offset press, he said.

"It was a wild time," he said.

The Nevada Appeal has called several Carson City locations home:

1865-1948: Second and Carson streets

1948-1951: 110 West Telegraph Street

1951-1974: The Carson Brewing Co. building

1974-present: 200 Bath St., with a stint at 430 Jeanell Drive in 1979-1980 after a fire.