Billings Gazette Building is SOLD, Here’s What’s Next

The sprawling Billings Gazette building in downtown Billings is now SOLD. Here's who owns it now- and, what's next for the sprawling downtown building and the shrinking Gazette staff.

The headline seems to say it all: "Billings Gazette building sells to Stockman Bank, paper will print in Bozeman"

Here's what the Billings Gazette shared via X: "The news operation, including reporters, editors, photographers and advertising staff, will stay in the Billings area and are beginning the process of looking for a new office."

What will Stockman Bank do with the location? Here's a summary from Grok: 

This has been a pattern across the Lee Newspapers in Montana.

The Missoulian had to sell their building near the Clark Fork River, and recently stopped printing the paper on certain days.

Here's part of what Dennis Bragg wrote back in 2023: End of an Era, Missoulian Cutting Back on Printing Days

The end of tradition, which had already largely disappeared

For decades, and even before the Internet's impact on mass media, newspapers had struggled to balance costs and revenues. One of the first big steps was the loss of "afternoon papers", which vanished in efforts to be more competitive against television news back in the 1980s. Between 2000 and 2010, papers across the country, including the Missoulian, began cutting back on the number of pages, and reducing the size of their papers, shifting more content online. They also consolidated print operations in an effort to shave further costs.

Yet even so, long-standing news consumption trends continued to vanish, as computers, and then phones, became the delivery system of choice for most people. That's applied to both morning papers and evening television news programs.