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Groundbreaking video at the future Naples Daily News site. Watch »

Video

Naples Daily News celebrates with a ground breaking for the new building to come. Watch »

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With a salute from the Gulf Coast High School color guard and the national anthem, the Naples Daily News began a groundbreaking for a new headquarters Thursday.

The groundbreaking brought hundreds of people out to the new site off Immokalee Road in North Naples, including some community leaders, employees and corporate executives of the E.W. Scripps Co., the newspaper’s parent company in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Retired employees and current ones mingled with friends and former colleagues at a second ceremony, which got under way around 5 p.m.

“This event, I’ve been describing it as a pep rally,” Daily News Publisher Chris Doyle said.

In a video, business and community leaders applauded the Daily News for its success and wished it luck with its new $95 million headquarters, which broke ground a few weeks ago behind the Granada Shoppes.

“I want you to keep changing,” Immokalee activist Fred Thomas said.

“Keep the presses rolling,” Collier Commissioner Jim Coletta said.

The new 186,000-square-foot headquarters will include a state-of-the-art printing press, allowing the Daily News to deliver a cleaner, more visually appealing product, said the newspaper’s operations director, Tom Sewall.

It will have 60,000 square feet of office space on two floors and 120,000 square feet of production and warehouse space.

The project will include a cutting-edge TV/broadcast studio, walking paths for employees and park-like grounds.

“The future is finally here and I’m excited,” Doyle said.

William Burleigh, chairman of E.W. Scripps, said people thought the company was crazy when it made a $165 million bid to buy the Daily News in 1986, a record at the time. Now, people think the company is crazy for making such an investment in a newspaper today.

He called it “an act of faith.”

“We’re a newspaper company. We’re proud of what we’ve built in Naples,” he said.