Kingsville Publishing Company moves to historic SGBI building

The Kingsville Publishing Company, which publishes The Kingsville Record and Bishop News, has moved its operations to the historic Santa Gertrudis Breeders International building at the intersection of Highway 141 and West Santa Gertrudis Boulevard across from the main entrance to King Ranch.

The newspaper will be open for business at its new location on Monday.

SGBI has relocated to an office at King Ranch near the King Ranch Visitor Center.

In conjunction with KPC’s move, it has also initiated a new website for The Kingsville Record and Bishop News and shut down its printing press in favor of outsourcing printing of the newspaper to a regional press located in Beeville.

The Kingsville Publishing Company will continue to offer fine commercial printing services.

The move and new printing schedule will allow the newspaper to be distributed much earlier, and the newspaper will also appear on line much earlier at its new subscriber-based website.

Office hours are Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The classified advertising department will remain open until 6 p.m. on Mondays and Thursdays.

All subscribers to the print edition of the newspaper will be given a password that gives them access to the website. For the next 30- days, however, the website is accessible without a password to give all readers a chance to become familiar with the website. The website address is www.kr-bn.com.

Website subscribers will have a print edition of the newspaper mailed to them or they can pick up a copy at the newspaper’s new location.

The move to the historic SGBI building had been in the works for the past few months. The Kingsville Publishing Company was located in a 20,000 square-foot building at 105 S. Fifth St. for the past 40 years.

The building was designed as a hot-metal printing facility that used 19th and early 20th century technology to produce a newspaper.

With the advent of cold-type printing, which is based on photo imaging, and later desktop printing using Macintosh computers and laser printers, the need for complicated mechanical equipment to produce a newspaper was eliminated along with the need for a large facility.

Like many newspapers in Texas and throughout the nation, the publishing company decided to use a regional press handling many newspapers to print The Kingsville Record and Bishop News as a more cost-effective way to produce Kingsville’s hometown newspaper.

The SGBI office building, located on a three-acre wooded site, is less than half the size of the old KPC location but more suitable for offices and the computer graphics method of producing a modern newspaper.

The structure was built in the mid-1960s and remodeled and expanded in later years to its present size. SGBI was founded in Kingsville in 1950.

The new location for the newspaper will offer better parking for both its customers and employees.

The newspaper was founded in 1906 as the Gulf Coast Record with offices located on Kleberg Avenue. The newspaper’s name was later changed to The Kingsville Record and eventually moved to Fifth Street, which was a thriving commercial street at the time.

The weekly Kingsville Record acquired the Bishop News in the mid-1960s and became The Kingsville Record and Bishop News, publishing twice a week and focusing on hometown news.

Recognizing the ever-increasing influence of the worldwide web as a means of disseminating news, The Kingsville Record and Bishop News website aims to offer a variety of services over the next couple of months, including timely video clips of community events, news and sports bulletins, links to the websites of newspaper advertisers and links to organizations and governmental entities.

However, The Kingsville Record and Bishop News recognizes that hometown weekly and semi-weekly newspapers continue to be popular in their traditional newsprint format. Therefore, hard copies of the newpaper will continue to be made available either at our new location or through various retail locations in town.

In the meantime, SGBI has settled into its new location at King Ranch. The Santa Gertrudis breed, developed by King Ranch, was recognized in 1940 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as the first beef breed developed in the United States; it was also the first breed developed anywhere in the world in more than a century.