Photo gallery: The Daily News, then and now

After 131 years of reporting in the McKeesport area, the Daily News' final edition slid off the press rollers and loaded into the back of delivery vans one last time on Thursday.

In the newsroom, a pushpin holds a local church bulletin asking for prayers for the newspaper to find a buyer before its closing date. Outside, as the presses whirred to a standstill, sisters Barb and Donna Mima stood in the blue morning hours watching the pressmen close a chapter of history through the street level windows.

“Mankind was our business. We wanted to tell their story. Without the people, without the community out there, we were nothing,” said longtime Daily News editor Carol Waterloo Frazier, herself a daughter of two former Daily News employees. As veteran delivery man Rob Kozub makes his last drops at diners, convenience stores and tobacco shops across McKeesport and North Versailles, store owners watch him coming and going with a smile on their lips but a sadness in their eyes. They thank him for everything he's done. The headline wrapped across the final front page — “Thanks, Mon Valley” — answers back.

Hardly a new story, the Daily News adds to the slow waterfall of newspaper closings across America. The newspaper's circulation numbers mirror the same rise and fall of population in McKeesport and the Mon Valley. The now “indefinitely idled” U.S. Steel Corporation's National Tube Works sits next to the black and white striped headquarters of the Daily News, waiting to trade stories of the glory days when men would pour out of the former and grab a paper at the latter.

The gallery above pairs old photos from the Daily News archives with photos created from the same locations in the last weeks of the newspaper's run. While typewriters give way to computers, the dangling strips of film negatives of high school football games suggest that someone is about to return from developing another roll of film for the next day's paper. Some places seem to change and some not at all. So it is outside the walls. The palpable change is countered by a definite, sometimes ghostly, familiarity.

If these walls could talk, they would tell the stories of the people of the Mon Valley. If these walls could talk, they would tell you that the employees of the Daily News were a part of those stories all along.

If these walls could talk, they too would echo the A1 headline, “Thanks, Mon Valley.”