Courier-News to vacate Elgin headquarters

By mid-December, the Courier-News will vacate its longtime Elgin offices and consolidate operations with an Aurora office that currently houses the Aurora Beacon-News and the Naperville Sun.

“Our employees in Elgin have been told ... they will be relocating to another one of our offices and working there,” said Jeremy Halbreich, CEO and vice chairman of Sun-Times Media, the Courier's parent company.

“It will represent a much more efficient way of publishing a local community newspaper that will remain focused on Elgin and Elgin alone,” Halbreich said.

Editorial staffers will have the option of working from home or remotely or from Aurora, Halbreich said.

The Courier-News was formed in 1925 from a merger of The Elgin Daily News and The Elgin Daily Courier, two papers founded in the late 1800s, according to the company website. Longtime owner Copley Press sold the Courier-News and several other Copley suburban dailies to Hollinger International in 2000. Sun-Times Media group is the current owner.

The Courier has occupied its location at 300 Lake St. in downtown Elgin since 1956, said E.C. “Mike” Alft, a local author and historian who writes a monthly column for the paper.

“It is a loss for Elgin because a newspaper, over a long period of time, records the history of the community and that's what the Courier-News has been doing, the news since 1876,” said Alft, a 50-year subscriber. “So for more than a century, those papers and their combined circulation have explained what was going on the big events and the small events.”

Halbreich says the Aurora move won't compromise the paper's coverage in the Elgin area, as its reporters will continue to be visible.

But Alft said the paper's physical absence will be a loss to Elgin.

The paper for years has been printed off site. It currently is printed along with the Sun-Times in Chicago.

The Courier's building has been for sale for more than a year. When the company announced the building was on the market, it said it would rent office space elsewhere in Elgin for its staff once the sale was complete.

While some employees have indicated the building has been sold, Halbreich would not confirm that.

Messages with the listing agents have not been returned.

The newspaper in the last couple years dropped its Saturday edition, went from a broadsheet to a tabloid format and raised its daily price to $1.