A local Oregon newspaper has been forced to lay off its entire staff after discovering rampant embezzlement by a former employee, effectively shutting down the publication’s printing after forty years.
The Eugene Weekly began finding bookkeeping inaccuracies about a week before Christmas, editor Camilla Mortensen said to CBS News.
Upon further investigation, employees discovered that an ex-staffer who was “heavily involved” in the paper’s finances had stolen at least $90,000 from the company since 2022, and had left at least $100,00 in unpaid business bills.
Multiple current employees also noticed that money taken from their paychecks for retirement funds was never actually deposited in their pension accounts.
Mortensen said that the weekly publication had to let all 10 of its staff members go after the shocking discovery, and printing has stopped for the first time in decades.
“To lay off a whole family’s income three days before Christmas is the absolute worst,” the editor said. “It was not on my radar that anything like this could have happened or was happening.”
The suspect was employed with the Eugene paper for approximately four years, and has since been fired while the Eugene Police Department investigates.
The owners of Eugene Weekly have also independently hired forensic accountants to conduct their own thorough search, Mortensen added.
The paper’s online edition released a statement for readers, entitled “Where’s the Damn Paper?”
Dear Eugene Weekly Readers,
Eugene Weekly is this town. We are who we are because we are the community’s paper, for better or for worse. We’ve sought to enlighten you. We’ve sought to entertain you. We’ve pissed you off, even when we didn’t mean to. And most of all, we have stood as this community’s alternative voice, a watchdog that speaks up to power on behalf of everyone.
We’re heartbroken to have to tell you that this independent voice is in danger of falling silent.
There will be no print paper edition of EW, for the first time in more than 20 years.
Despite the hardships, the announcement said that “several EW staffers are showing up to keep publishing the paper online. We ask for your patience as we work to restore EW to the newspaper you love.”
“This paper is definitely an integral part of the community, and we really want to bring it back and bounce back bigger and better if we can,” Todd Cooper, the paper’s art director, told CBS.
A GoFundMe launched to raise money to reinstate the printed paper has already garnered nearly $28,000 in just two days.
Now that the embezzlement has been caught and the former employee has been fired, “We have a lot of hope that this paper is going to come back and be self-sustaining and go forward,” Cooper said. “Hell, it’ll hopefully last another 40 years.”
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