In their nearly 200-year-old building on West State Street, just a few Ithaca Journal editors are working in the back of the dimly lit office. Sunday evenings are typically slow, said Tom Fleischman, a 25-year veteran of the Journal, but, he admits, empty desks are a growing trend.

It was a transition night. On Monday morning, the Ithaca Journal would look different, as described by Managing Editor Bruce Estes’ front-page column that day and in columns that ran over the previous three Saturdays.

In his column, Estes mentions a new, cleaner-looking nameplate and a new home for features like weather, lottery numbers, obituaries and local and state news, all of which were moved by just a page or two.

But the changes are more than just design decisions. To minimize costs in an economy that has proven deadly for the newspaper industry, the Journal, The Elmira Star-Gazette and The Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin — three separate Gannett newspapers that cover three “very different” communities — have now centralized a large aspect of production into one office in Vestal, N.Y.

The recession has worsened a problem that started with a shift in the way people consume the news — circulation continues to decline though Web page hits are up. But the digital news model has yet to help advertising revenue, which newspapers need to survive. Just this year, at least 120 newspapers have folded, according to Paper Cuts, a Web site that tracks newspaper closings, buyouts and layoffs.

Gannett used a similar consolidation strategy in the Westchester, N.Y., area in 1988. Ten local newspapers were merged into one regional paper, The Journal-News.

Fleischman, one of the longest-working people in the newsroom, said when he started, there about a dozen full-time reporters. Now there are four. He said other departments are much the same.

The Ithaca Journal’s Metro Editor David Hill said the idea is to keep the final product as close to what readers expect of the Journal.

“It’s not really three editions of the same paper,” he said. “It really is three separate papers.”

Estes describes the new operation as the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Production of all three papers will take place in one office, using one staff instead of three. The Vestal office will serve as the hub — a center for back area functions like pagination, photo placement and headline writing. Each spoke represents an office like the Journal’s, serving as an information-gathering function for local news that feeds back to the hub.

“It will be a very complex task to pull it off perfectly in the first week,” Estes said. “There will be a lot of conversation taking place.”

Everyone affected by the consolidation had the opportunity to transfer to Vestal to work on the central editing and pagination desks. Three of them have taken the transfer; four took a severance package.

In a staff that has typically been made up of about 70 people, Estes, who has been on staff for 13 years, said the Journal has always bred a close-knit working environment — colleagues know each other well, they know each other’s kids, their interests and what they do outside of work.

“It’s really a sad thing to see people leave, and it’s not any of their faults,” he said.

Fleischman was one of the four who decided not to transfer to Vestal. On Oct. 10, 1983, then a 24-year-old sports writer, Fleischman worked his first day on the job. On Sunday, he worked his last.

“People here will say there weren’t even computers when I started,” he said. “Well, it wasn’t that far back. It wasn’t quite stone tablets.”

But it has been quite a while, especially at a paper where Estes said people tend to move on after about 10 years.

Thinking back on his own career — Fleischman said he had always wanted to be a sports writer but discovered he was a sort of jack-of-all trades within the newsroom — Fleischman thinks of Kenny Van Sickle, a sports writer and editor who worked for the Journal for 56 years.

“I was here about half that time,” he said. “But at the rate I was going, I thought that’s where I was heading. It was a little bit of a shock.”

Characteristic of his 25 years with the Journal, Fleischman was at the office on Sunday to lend a hand in transitioning to the new model — though he joked he would do it “misty-eyed.”

Sunday was also a nostalgic day for Hill, who has worked at the Journal as reporter and editor for 14 years. He talked about his first journalism class in college and a professor who stressed that the media in this country are for-profit businesses.

“People forget that,” he said. “Not that it’s our primary concern, but what he said was true.”

Compared to newspapers around the country, many of which have closed their doors for good, the situation at the Ithaca Journal is moderate, Hill said. But the recession has yet to turn around, and a streamlined production process doesn’t change the fact that ad revenue is falling. Even if it were to remain stagnant, Estes said there are bound to be more changes in the future. He’s uneasy at the thought of the paper’s worst-case scenario.

“I’m going to work really, really hard to see that doesn’t happen,” he said.

Though Fleischman packed up his desk at the end of Sunday’s shift, he said he will be keeping an eye on the paper as a daily subscriber.

“Every day we’ve been assured that there will still be an Ithaca Journal,” he said. “I’m going to believe them until I see otherwise.”