Press Register Moves to a New Home in 1934

The Mobile Press Register moved into this building in 1934.
This photo is from the Eric Overbey Collection, The Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama, and appeared in Mobile Bay magazine.

The building as it looks today at the northwest corner of St. Louis and Hamilton streets.
Photo by Larry Bell. 

The Mobile Press Register expects to have its employees in new digs in downtown Mobile by the end of summer 2014. They will be moving into the former Kress Building at 18 S. Royal Street, just south of where it meets Dauphin Street.

Almost exactly 80 years ago, the newspaper moved into another renovated older building.

After the Mobile Press acquired the Mobile Register in 1932, the owners decided to consolidate the two newspaper offices. The Press had started in a converted church building at the northeast corner of Jackson and St. Michael streets. The Register operated out of a building at the corner of St. Joseph and St. Michael streets.

The Press especially needed a better space. Working conditions in its building were hot and filthy as the Linotypes’ lead pots spread heat and fumes throughout the building. All of the desks had fans in effort to keep those sitting at them cool.

The building’s arrangement was also inefficient. Photo engravings for the Press were made at the Gulf States Engraving Col., which occupied the second story of building on St. Michael Street, next to the Press. Gulf States delivered the engravings across the roof to the newspaper.

In May 1934, the Press Register moved into a 40,000-square-foot building formerly used as a car dealership. The building at the northwest corner of St. Louis and Hamilton streets was owned by the McGowin family, who also happened to be major stockholders in the newspaper.

In 1944, The Mobile Press Register moved again, this time to another former car dealership building at the northeast corner of Government and Claiborne streets. (See the Jan. 4 post.)

Chasing Ads and Readers Not a New Problem

Newspapers today are faced with finding ways to replace revenue lost from rapidly declining advertising and subscriptions. Newspaper classified advertising alone, which accounted for about 40 percent of newspaper industry ad revenue in 2000, had dropped 77 percent by 2012.

On Alabama’s early frontier, The Mobile Register faced a similar problem. Not with replacing lost revenue, but with finding it in the first place.

In 1820, Mobile County had a total population of only 2,672 people, and 836 of those were slaves. That wasn’t much of an advertising or subscription base.

There were businessmen who wanted to buy ads and subscriptions, but the problem was that there just wasn’t much hard money to do so.

The shortage of cash on the frontier forced the Register to adopt a system of credit that often brought it grief.

The newspaper made frequent calls on its subscribers and advertisers to pay what they owed. It issued calls so frequently, in fact, that customers often didn’t take the newspaper seriously. “Lest our patrons should suspect it to be the case with us,” the Register said in 1822, “we assure them, ‘in right good earnest,’ that we are really in want of funds.”

To make ends meet the Register found other ways of making money.

An important source was job printing. The job office printed bill heads, bills of lading, checks, dray receipts, tickets, circulars, cards, notes, insurance policies, labels, handbills, posters, wedding invitations, books, pamphlets and all the forms of paperwork needed in business and society.

During election campaigns, the presses ran almost constantly to print campaign materials. For lawyers, the job shop published and sold a digest of city ordinances.

From the earliest days of the town, businessmen needed a place to gather to smoke and exchange news of ship sailings, cargoes and distant markets. At first, hotel lobbies, the post office and saloons filled the need. The Register and other newspapers soon began to provide more accommodating quarters called reading rooms.

For a subscription fee of about $10 a year, the Register supplied businessmen with newspapers from around the country and from abroad, as well as maps, charts, periodicals, books, shipping lists and prices current (market reports) from the principal markets. Furniture and tables provided businessmen a comfortable place of examining the materials.

In our digital age, The Mobile Register won’t be producing a variety of print products to find more revenue. Just how the Register and other newspapers ultimately will solve their revenue problems can’t be predicted, but there’s no question that it is going to be fascinating to watch.