ALPENA — The Alpena News will host an open house on Thursday to celebrate its 125th anniversary.

Members of the public are welcome to come to The News office at 130 Park Place in downtown Alpena to take a tour of the building, view the printing press, and visit with staff members on Thursday, which is the actual anniversary of the newspaper.

News Publisher/Editor Justin Hinkley will lead tours of the building at 1 p.m., 2:30 p.m., and 4 p.m. on Thursday.

Hinkley said the tours will give members of the community an opportunity to see how a newspaper gets put together every day. He will lead visitors through the front office, circulation department, advertising department, the newsroom, the pressroom, and the mailroom.

The building is full of activity from 8 a.m. to after midnight Mondays through Fridays as the mailroom crew works into the night to prepare papers to go out to readers in the mail the next day.

Front office, circulation, and advertising staff members typically work during business hours, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. five days a week.

Editorial staff members in the newsroom, including reporters and editors, work a variety of hours which differ from day to day depending on the events and topics that need to be covered.

The press crew comes in around 7 p.m. and works six nights per week, as The Alpena News is printed Mondays through Saturdays.

The deadline for the paper to be ready and “off the floor” — sent from the newsroom to the pressroom — is about 10:30 p.m. Once the pages have been filled with content from reporters and laid out by editors, the press fires up and quickly prints thousands of papers at a speed you have to see (and hear) to believe.

Then the mailroom staff members take the papers literally “hot off the press” and stuff them with advertising flyers and special tabs that go inside the folded papers, according to a schedule set by the advertising staff members.

Bringing news to Northeast Michigan six days per week is truly a team effort at The Alpena News.

Hinkley said the tours will “show you every step in the process of how a newspaper comes together, and how it ends up on your doorstep every day.”

He explained why newspapers and the community should not only interact but maintain a balanced and mutually beneficial relationship.

“The Alpena News is an important institution in this community,” Hinkley said. “This is just a great opportunity for people to learn more about the newspaper and what it does and how it does it and why it does it … I think it will be fun and interesting for the community to come out and enjoy it.”

He said he will be open to taking any questions from attendees.

“Newspapers do a couple of things,” Hinkley said. “They provide the information you need to make well-informed decisions today, about everything from how to vote to where to live to what community organizations you want to get involved in to where you want to put your money where you want to shop, what’s going on in your town, so you know what’s happening today. And, as exemplified by the fact that we’ve been around for 125 years, newspapers record history as it happens. One hundred years from now, people are going to look to The Alpena News archives to find out what life was like in Alpena, Michigan in 2024.”

He continued to note the importance of having a local newspaper presence in your community.

“Newspapers preserve our history,” Hinkley said. “It’s important to preserve that so that people can be informed. There’s all kinds of research out there about bad things that happen when towns lose their newspapers. Voter participation goes down, government spending goes up, government corruption goes up, involvement in civic organizations goes down, volunteerism goes down, charity goes down. So newspapers foster those community conversations that keep people engaged, and it’s engaged people that make better communities.”

He added that The Alpena News is one of the few papers in Michigan that still has an in-house printing press, which is quite rare nowadays, especially for a community of our size.

“Over the last 10 to 20 years, there’s been a ton of consolidation of presses,” Hinkley said. “The majority of newspapers in Michigan are printed off of less than a handful of presses now. So for a paper in a community the size of Alpena to have a printing press is a rare thing.”

He added that the press is not just used to print newspapers.

“It’s important,” he said. “The printing press is there for the community. A lot of people may not realize this, but we can print just about anything that people need. We can do tabs, we can do booklets, we can do magazines, we can do flyers. And we can insert them into the paper and distribute them to our thousands of readers or we can just hand them back to you to hand out at events. Whatever you want to do. But that printing press is a real asset to the community.”

The Alpena News was founded on Aug. 1, 1899, and has been in continuous operation since then.

“We plan on being around for another 125 years and more,” Hinkley added.

Even in the digital world we live in, Hinkley said, the printed edition of the newspaper will continue to be offered for years and years to come.

“Our printed product is still going strong,” he said. “It’s still heavily valued by our readers, and it’s going to be around as long as that’s true.”

He said news is continuously updated online at TheAlpenaNews.com, offering complementary additions to the print edition, including color photos, videos, and supplementary documents that help provide an even more in-depth picture of the news of today.

Darby Hinkley is Lifestyles editor. She can be reached at 989-358-5691 or dhinkley@thealpenanews.com.