After decades printing the Chinook Observer across the Columbia at The Astorian, with this edition we’ve moved back to the Washington side. As a fifth-generation Washingtonian, keeping business here always appeals to me.

Our new Lakewood-based printer gives us full color on every page. The move back here to Washington should also help us realize some cost savings, thus helping preserve our award-winning mix of specifically local news, sports, features and opinion content.

Even with these advantages, we’re sad to bid farewell to the dedicated press and mailroom team at The Astorian, who have served us, our readers and advertisers well for half a century. They’ve done marvelous work and we thank them from the bottom of our hearts.

When I started editing the Chinook Observer in 1991, I recall Mark and Terri Kester — our ace news/sports writer and ad manager — telling me about their adventures getting our completed pages across the river in time to meet our printing deadline. (There’s nothing quite as intimidating as an angry press boss and crew kept waiting too long after the pages were supposed to be ready to run.) I can’t exactly recall their record between our little old office on Oregon Street in Long Beach to the Astorian offices on Exchange — maybe 22 minutes?

That was in the era when laying out a newspaper was a little like a kindergarten art project, using sticky hot wax to attach galleys of printed type and half-toned photos to giant paper grids. It was a fun but labor-intensive process — thinking about it makes me recall the smell of the wax, painful nicks from Exacto blades, and the eye-straining flicker of fluorescent lighting as we toiled into night.

We gradually adopted ever-more sophisticated news technology and eventually eliminated the need to physically deliver paper layouts to Astoria. We were early users of Apple computers — little block-like plastic cubes with screens that can’t have been much more than eight inches wide. Designing the wide newsprint pages we had back then was like building a ship in a bottle, since we could only see a small fraction of each page at any one time.

Although it will be easy electronically transmitting our pages to the new printer, transporting the printed and assembled newspapers back down here will require some minor logistical magic. Especially in this first week, you may notice some slight differences in content as we work out new deadlines involving the many people who contribute to making the Observer all it is. I expect to end up with the same great mix of content as before, reflecting our area’s rich and unique personality — factors that contribute to the Observer being named one of the state’s best a dozen times.

All businesses change, and the ones that survive and prosper adapt and make themselves stronger. I’m optimistic this will be true of the Chinook Observer, which is healthy in every sense and which I expect to remain robust long after I’ve retired after a few more years here.

Thank you for your continuing support.