Oregon Newspaper Stops Printing After Embezzlement Leaves It in ‘Shambles’

A weekly newspaper in Oregon abruptly stopped publishing and laid off all of its employees after an worker embezzled tens of hundreds of {dollars} and left months of payments unpaid, its editor stated.

The newspaper, The Eugene Weekly, introduced on Thursday that it will cease printing after it found monetary issues, together with cash not being paid into worker retirement accounts and $70,000 of unpaid payments to the newspaper’s printer, Camilla Mortensen, the newspaper’s editor, stated on Sunday.

The complete 10-person newspaper workers was laid off three days earlier than Christmas, although some employees, together with Ms. Mortensen, have been nonetheless volunteering to publish articles on-line.

The Eugene Weekly, a free newspaper, was based in 1982 and every week prints 30,000 copies, which might be present in brilliant crimson containers in and round Eugene, one of the vital populous cities in Oregon.

Recent articles described a New Year’s Day hike led by guides at a state park, the efforts of a close-by unincorporated neighborhood, Blue River, to get better from a 2020 wildfire, and a memorial to individuals who had died homeless in 2023.

Leaders of The Eugene Weekly stated in a letter to readers that the newspaper’s funds had been left in “shambles,” however they deliberate to battle to maintain the publication alive.

“The damage is more than most small businesses can bear,” the letter stated. “The scale of this moment is unlike anything we have ever faced. But we believe in this newspaper’s mission and we remain determined to keep EW alive.”

Melinda McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Eugene Police Department, stated that the police have been investigating however couldn’t present extra particulars whereas the inquiry was underway. The now-former worker accused of the embezzlement, who was concerned within the newspaper’s funds, was not publicly recognized.

Ms. Mortensen, who joined the paper in 2007 and have become editor in 2016, stated that the paper has requested that the police pursue prices in opposition to the individual accused of embezzlement, who had labored there for at the very least 5 years.

The worker was out of the workplace earlier this month when questions arose about closing the monetary data for the 12 months and abruptly a bunch of issues turned obvious, Ms. Mortensen stated.

“Every time I find something out, I just get sick to my stomach,” she stated. “And again, this is someone we worked with who came to the office every day.”

These issues have been found because the newspaper tried to get better from monetary losses it had earlier within the Covid-19 pandemic, when companies, similar to native eating places and occasion organizers, had stopped shopping for advertisements, Ms. Mortensen stated.

In current years, as native newspapers have quickly shuttered and drastically lowered workers, The Eugene Weekly had taken steps to curb prices by chopping what number of pages it printed.

Almost 2,900 newspapers have shut down since 2005, based on a 2023 report by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. All however about 100 of the shuttered newspapers have been weeklies. Most communities that lose a newspaper don’t get a alternative.

Before the pandemic, The Eugene Weekly had performed effectively financially, Ms. Mortensen stated.

The house owners, Anita Johnson, who Ms. Mortensen stated is 94 years previous and visited the workplace twice per week, and Georga Taylor, have by no means taken the newspaper’s income and at all times put the cash again into the enterprise to pay for bills, similar to employee bonuses and new tools. They additionally coated the prices for the final print version of the paper, which got here out on Dec. 21.

Ms. Johnson and her husband, Art Johnson, and Ms. Taylor’s husband, Fred Taylor, bought the paper within the Nineties. Ms. Johnson had been a reporter at The Washington Post and Mr. Taylor, who died in 2015, was a former govt editor of The Wall Street Journal.

Ms. Mortensen stated that whereas newspapers have centered a number of consideration on their digital product, in Eugene and the agricultural cities that encompass it, “the print paper is still something that people really value.”

The Eugene Weekly is accepting donations to assist it publish once more and created a web based fund-raiser that had collected greater than $42,000 as of Monday morning.

Ms. Mortensen stated that folks had additionally stopped by the workplace to make donations. An area bookseller who got here by cried as she described how she had informed guests at her store what occurred to the paper after they requested about getting a duplicate.

Support has additionally come from sudden locations, similar to retired journalists from The Register-Guard, town’s each day newspaper, who volunteered enhancing assist.

Ms. Mortensen stated that the assist had given her hope that the newspaper would possibly be capable of print once more.

“I can think of $150,000 that we need to get to be a viable paper again,” Ms. Mortensen stated. “And I’m looking at some of the money and going, ‘Oh my God, can we do this?’”