Oregon newspaper stops printing after embezzlement leaves it in ‘mess’

An Oregon weekly newspaper abruptly stopped publishing and fired all of its employees after an employee embezzled tens of thousands of dollars and left months of bills unpaid, the editor said.

The newspaper, The Eugene Weekly, announced Thursday it would stop printing after discovering financial problems, including money not being deposited into employees’ retirement accounts and $70,000 in unpaid bills to the newspaper’s printer, Camilla Mortensen said , the editor of the newspaper, Sunday. .

The entire ten-person newspaper staff was laid off three days before Christmas, although some employees, including Ms. Mortensen, still voluntarily published 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 the most populous cities in Oregon.

Recent articles described a New Year’s walk led by guides in a state park, the efforts of a nearby unincorporated community, Blue River, to recover from a wildfire in 2020and a memorial for people who had died homeless in 2023.

So said leaders at The Eugene Weekly in a letter to readers that the paper’s finances were “a mess,” but they planned to fight to keep the publication alive.

“The damage is greater than most small businesses can bear,” the letter said. “The magnitude of this moment is unlike anything we have ever experienced. But we believe in the mission of this newspaper and we remain committed to keeping EW alive.”

Melinda McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Eugene Police Department, said police were investigating but could not provide further details as the investigation was ongoing. The now-former employee accused of the embezzlement and involved in the newspaper’s finances was not publicly identified.

Ms Mortensen, who joined the paper in 2007 and became editor in 2016, said charges had been 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 the financial accounts for the year and suddenly a whole host of problems became apparent, Ms Mortensen said.

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

These problems were discovered as the newspaper tried to recover from financial losses it suffered earlier during the Covid-19 pandemic, when businesses, such as local restaurants and event organizers, had stopped buying ads, Ms. Mortensen said.

In recent years, as local newspapers have rapidly closed their doors and drastically reduced staff, The Eugene Weekly has taken steps to rein in costs by cutting back on the number of pages printed.

According to figures, almost 2,900 newspapers have closed since 2005 a 2023 report by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. All but about 100 of the shuttered newspapers were weeklies. Most communities that lose a newspaper do not get a replacement.

Before the pandemic, The Eugene Weekly had been doing well financially, Ms. Mortensen said.

The owners, Anita Johnson, who Ms. Mortensen said is 94 years old and visited the office twice a week, and Georga Taylor, never took over the newspaper’s profits and always put the money back into the business to pay costs, as employee bonuses and new equipment. They also paid the costs for the last printed edition of the newspaper, which came out on December 21.

Mrs. Johnson and her husband, Art Johnson, and Mrs. Taylor’s husband, Fred Taylor, purchased the paper in the 1990s. Ms. Johnson was a reporter at The Washington Post and Mr. Taylor, who died in 2015, was one former editor-in-chief from The Wall Street Journal.

Ms. Mortensen said that while newspapers have put a lot of focus on their digital product, in Eugene and surrounding rural towns “the printed paper is still something that people really value.”

The Eugene Weekly accepts donations to republish it and created an online fundraiser that had raised more than $35,000 by Sunday morning.

Ms Mortensen said people had also stopped by the office to make donations. A local bookseller who stopped by wept as she described how she had told visitors in her store what had happened to the newspaper when they asked if they could get a copy.

Support also came from unexpected sources, such as retired journalists from The Register-Guard, the city’s daily newspaper, who volunteered to help with editing.

Ms Mortensen said the support had given her hope that the newspaper might be able to print again.

“I can think of $150,000 we need to become a viable newspaper again,” Ms. Mortensen said. “And I look at some of the money and think, ‘Oh my God, can we do this?'”