Statesman to sell its building after 48 years. Here’s what it means for our journalism
.jpg "The newsroom staff in October 2019 as the Statesman prepared to welcome Treasure Valley residents to celebrate its 155th anniversary inside its building at 1200 N. Curtis Road.")
The Idaho Statesman is selling its building on Curtis Road that has been home for almost half a century.
The sale will have no impact either on the Statesman’s journalism or on its employees in news, advertising and elsewhere. The transaction comes as the newspaper’s staff works mostly from home, as it has for the past seven months to help curb the coronavirus pandemic.
The prospective buyer will put the building at 1200 N. Curtis Road to a new use: temperature-controlled storage units.
Cedar Creek Wealth, an Eagle firm founded, led and co-owned by A.J. Osborne, is the buyer. The company owns storage businesses in six states, including four in the Treasure Valley. It expects to close the deal in December.
The sale is a sign of the Statesman’s evolution from traditional daily print into contemporary digital journalism. The 105,000-square-foot building has been underused since the newspaper first shut its aging presses and outsourced printing 11 years ago.
As readers moved online, the Statesman moved with them. It now has nearly 10,500 digital-only subscribers, and 65% of its print subscribers have activated the online access included in their print subscriptions.
Yet the worldwide decline in print readership and advertising pushed McClatchy, the Statesman’s owner, to streamline and consolidate traditional newspaper tasks and roles, which led to a smaller workforce.
The Statesman plans to lease a smaller office for staff use when it is safe to return, and its executives say Idahoans will be welcomed there.
“This is a major part of our transformation into a digital news organization,” Publisher Rusty Dodge said by phone. “The building no longer fits our needs. We need a faster, more modern space that is capable of handling the news organization we are today.”
Editor Christina Lords said the pandemic’s persistence this fall means employees likely will continue to work from home into the new year.
“Until we get the virus under control and we’re less worried about the health of our own workforce, we would be working remotely anyway,” Lords said by phone. “Our operating procedures for the newsroom will not change. Our newsgathering and our publishing into our website will not change.”
The sale price has not yet been disclosed. Osborne said it is less than the $5.5 million asking price when the building was advertised in 2019.
How Cedar Creek chose Statesman building
The Treasure Valley has so many storage businesses that the Nampa City Council last year imposed a moratorium on new ones. But Osborne said downtown Boise is one of the rare areas that lacks sufficient storage, and the Statesman building will provide it. The building is 3.4 miles from the Capitol.
“Idaho is No. 1 per square foot per capita in the U.S.,” Osborne said by phone. “It’s just over-supplied. The Statesman offered us access to a very small region of the state where the economics, the supply and demand for storage, was still good.”
Cedar Creek storage businesses operate under two brands: Keylock Storage and StoreLocal. Keylock has storage centers at Franklin and Locust Grove roads in Meridian, 450 S. Maple Grove Road in Boise, and 146 N. Middleton Road and 17792 Middleton Road in Nampa.
Osborne said the Statesman site will be named StoreLocal, and the Keylock sites eventually will be renamed StoreLocal too. StoreLocal is the brand of a national co-op of independent self-storage companies.
Cedar Creek offers “a very nice product,” he said. “We were one of the first in the entire nation to do a keyless system — we were the first people in Idaho to do this. People can run it off their phone.”
The Statesman building was suggested to Osborne by a former employee, Roc Pilon, who had helped Osborne convert an old Kmart in Reno into storage units. Pilon toured the building in May while searching for warehouse space for his Boise athletic-apparel company, Gymreapers.
“I figured, ‘This is too big for what I need, but it’s right up A.J.’s alley,’” said Pilon, who is investing in the storage business there.
The building’s location next to the Interstate 184 Connector’s Curtis Road interchange is desirable, but the building itself is an odd combination of office and industrial uses: part white-collar cubicles, part warehouse, part pressroom. That made it a challenge for many potential buyers but a good fit for a storage business.
Statesman has had several homes since founding
The Statesman has had numerous homes since its founding in 1864, one year after Abraham Lincoln declared Idaho a territory.
The first was a windowless log cabin with a dirt floor where City Hall stands today. Not long afterward came a small cabin at the corner of Seventh and Idaho streets.
The newsroom then moved to a two-story brick building that still stands on the southwest corner of 6th and Main streets. “Statesman” is still embedded in the white-tiled entryway adjoining the sidewalk.
In 1952, the paper transitioned to a new two-story building on the northeast corner of Sixth and Bannock streets — a convenient location for reporters just one block from the Capitol. It too still stands.
As Boise grew, so did the Statesman. In search of more space and parking and seeking easy freeway access for its delivery vehicles, it left downtown and moved in 1972 to the new building with a red-brick front along Curtis Road.
Osborne and Pilon said they will retain the building’s exterior, add a second floor within the cavernous pressroom (the press was removed in 2012), take down some interior walls, install hundreds of keyless storage units where news, advertising, circulation and finance staffs formerly worked, and use the small (6,000 square foot) second floor of the building’s office portion either for rental office space or records storage.
They plan to build enclosed storage units for recreational vehicles on a Statesman-owned parking lot across Eagleson Street from the rear of the building.
Pilon said the new owners plan to begin renovation in the first quarter of next year.
This story was originally published November 2, 2020 at 10:47 AM.
