Faced with mounting losses, the Star Ledger in Newark — New Jersey’s largest daily paper — is threatening to shut down at the end of the year unless it wins major concessions from its production unions by Sept. 27.
Publisher Rich Vezza said the paper lost $19.8 million last year and expects to lose a similar amount this year. It lost $12 million in 2011.
“The Star-Ledger has lost a significant amount of money in the past several years,” Vezza said in a memo to staffers.
The company is part of Advance Publications, controlled by the billionaire octogenarian brothers Donald and S.I. Newhouse, Jr., who also own Condé Nast.
Last year, the company cut the frequency of the Times Picayune in New Orleans from daily to three times a week and began covering the city 24/7 with its digital news service, NOLA.com.
Vezza said that is not in the cards for the Star Ledger.
“There are no plans for that,” he said. “This is strictly a labor issue at the Star Ledger.”
The company has already established NJ.com as a separate news company, which draws on material from the Star Ledger, the Jersey Journal, the Trenton Times and other daily and weekly papers that it owns around the state.
Vezza said the company determined that it could save $9 million by outsourcing the printing and production to outside vendors and went to four unions representing pressmen, mailers, engravers and machinists to try to obtain additional concessions.
“If the unions provide savings to approximate the savings that could be obtained through outsourcing, this would allow us to continue to print and package in-house, preserving both union and non-union jobs here at the Star-Ledger — otherwise we would like to outsource to obtain the savings.”
The Ledger’s move is similar to one taken by The New York Times Co. in 2009, when is threatened to shutter the Boston Globe unless the unions agreed to $20 million in concessions.
After a prolonged standoff, the unions eventually agreed to wage and other cuts.
Ed Shown, head of the pressman’s union, did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
kkelly@nypost.com