First, it was The Ann Arbor News that faced the cost-cutting buzzsaw. Then The Birmingham News, New Orleans’s Times-Picayune and Cleveland’s Plain-Dealer. And today, Advance Publications—the media conglomerate that owns a few dozen regional newspapers, the web site Reddit, and the magazine empire Condé Nast—is gutting The Oregonian, the Portland area’s d0minant daily newspaper.
The Oregonian, like the other Advance papers hit before it, will be transformed from a daily newspaper into a website and a scaled-down print paper that will only be delivered four days a week—Sunday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. It will also lay off a bunch of print reporters, all of whom are currently meeting with executives to find out who will get axed. The Oregonian, as such, will cease to exist, replaced by the “Oregon Media Group.”
The new company will run OregonLive.com and The Oregonian starting on October 1.
“This strategy will allow us to serve consumers in Oregon and Southwest Washington with more up-to-the-minute, robust news and information online and on mobile devices while continuing the strong enterprise and investigative reporting that The Oregonian and OregonLive.com are so well known for,” said N. Christian Anderson III, president and publisher of The Oregonian, in a statement. Mr. Anderson himself is getting a new job title—he will now be president of Oregonian Media Group.
As the news came out this afternoon, Oregonian reporters began tweeting about the looming layoffs.
