PORT TOWNSEND — And now it’s four . . .
The weekly Port Townsend & Jefferson County Leader is now being printed on newsprint produced by Nippon Paper Industries USA in Port Angeles.
Peninsula Daily News has been printed on the 40-gram-per-square-meter Nippon newsprint since June 2010.
The Sequim Gazette and Forks Forum made the switch in November, after Black Press Ltd. of Victoria purchased the PDN and Olympic View Publishing Co., which owned the two weeklies.
The PDN, the Gazette, the Leader and the Forum are now printed at the Sound Publishing Inc. press in Everett.
Community paper group
Sound Publishing — a Poulsbo-based division of Black Press — is the largest community newspaper group in the Pacific Northwest.
Scott Wilson, Leader owner and publisher, said his newspaper made the shift to support a North Olympic Peninsula business and take advantage of the brighter paper quality produced by Nippon.
Nippon employs 150 people and produces 155,000 tons of uncoated paper per year, much of it used for telephone directories.
It resumed making newsprint in 2010 after a 25-year hiatus. Its newsprint is also exported to newspapers in China and India.
About 25 percent of the fiber in the newsprint comes from recycled newsprint and waste paper.
The rest comes from wood chips from lumbering operations and residual wood waste.
