An Oregon weekly newspaper has abruptly halted publication and laid off all its workers after an employee embezzled tens of thousands of dollars and left months of bills unpaid, its editor said.
The newspaper, The Eugene Weekly, announced Thursday that it would stop printing after it discovered financial problems, including money not being paid into employees’ retirement accounts and $70,000 in unpaid bills. at the newspaper’s printer, Camilla Mortensen, the newspaper’s editor, said on Sunday.
The newspaper’s entire 10-person staff was laid off three days before Christmas, though some workers, including Ms. Mortensen, still volunteers to publish articles online.
The Eugene Weekly, a free newspaper, was founded in 1982 and prints 30,000 copies each week, which can be found in bright red boxes in and around Eugene, one of Oregon’s most populous cities.
Recent articles are described a walk on New Year’s Day led by guides in a state park, the efforts of a nearby unincorporated community, Blue River, to recover from the 2020 wildfireand a memorial to people who died homeless in 2023.
The leaders told The Eugene Weekly in a letter to readers that the newspaper’s finances were left in “disorder,” but they planned to fight to keep the publication alive.
“The damage is more than most small businesses can bear,” the letter said. “The scale of this moment is unlike anything we’ve ever faced. But we believe in the mission of this newspaper and we remain determined to keep EW alive.”
Melinda McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Eugene Police Department, said police are investigating but could not provide more details while the investigation is underway. The former employee accused of embezzlement, who was involved in the newspaper’s finances, has not been publicly identified.
Ms. Mortensen, who joined the paper in 2007 and became editor in 2016, said charges were filed against the person accused of embezzlement, who had worked there for at least five years.
The employee was out of the office earlier this month when questions arose about closing financial records for the year and suddenly many problems arose, Ms. Mortensen.
“Every time I find something, I just get sick to my stomach,” he said. “And again, this is someone we work with who comes into the office every day.”
These problems were discovered as the newspaper tried to recover from financial losses that preceded the Covid-19 pandemic, when businesses, such as local restaurants and event organizers, stopped buying ads, said Ms. Mortensen.
In recent years, as local newspapers have rapidly closed and drastically cut staff, The Eugene Weekly has taken steps to curb costs by cutting back on how many pages it prints. .
Nearly 2,900 newspapers have closed since 2005, according to the a report in 2023 of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. All but 100 of the closed newspapers were weeklies. Most communities that lose a newspaper never get a replacement.
Before the pandemic, The Eugene Weekly was doing well financially, Ms. Mortensen.
The owners, Anita Johnson, which Ms. Mortensen, who is 94 years old and visits the office twice a week, and Georga Taylor, never took the newspaper’s profits and always put money back into the business to pay expenses, such as worker bonuses and new equipment. They also covered the costs for the final print edition of the paper, which appeared on December 21.
Ms. Johnson and her husband, Art Johnson, and the husband of Ms. Taylor, Fred Taylor, bought the paper in the 1990s. Ms. Johnson is a reporter at The Washington Post and Mr. Taylor, who died in 2015, was a former executive editor of The Wall Street Journal.
said Ms. Mortensen said that while newspapers focus a lot of attention on their digital product, in Eugene and the rural towns that surround it, “the print paper is something that people really value.”
The Eugene Weekly is accepting donations to help it republish and create an online fund-raiser that had collected more than $42,000 as of Monday morning.
said Ms. Mortensen said people also stopped by the office to make donations. A local bookseller who passed by wept as he described how he told visitors to his store what happened to the paper when they asked about getting a copy.
Support also came from unexpected places, such as retired journalists from The Register-Guard, the city’s daily newspaper, who volunteered to help with editing.
said Ms. Mortensen said the support gave him hope that the newspaper might be able to print again.
“I can think of $150,000 that we need to become a viable paper again,” said Ms. Mortensen. “And I look at some of the money and say, ‘Oh my God, can we do this?’”
