After Embezzlement, Indie Paper Has to Lay Off Everyone

"Where's the Damn Paper?" reads the bold headline from a Thursday editorial in the Eugene Weekly, a local alternative newspaper that's served Oregon's second-largest city for more than four decades. The question was posed after the free publication ceased its print edition, following the discovery of a massive embezzlement by a now-former employee, per the paper's editor, Camilla Mortensen. Mortensen tells the AP that the suspect had been "heavily involved" in the newspaper's financials, and that they'd siphoned off $90,000 from the paper's bank account since at least 2022.

In addition, Mortensen says the newspaper has tens of thousands in unpaid bills—somewhere between $70,000 and $100,000, per the AP and New York Times—and money that was supposed to be deposited into employees' retirement accounts has also gone missing. Once the truth was discovered, Mortensen says, the paper was forced to let go its entire 10-person staff and bring publication to a halt. "To lay off a whole family's income three days before Christmas is the absolute worst," Mortensen tells the AP.

The collapse of the Eugene Weekly—founded in 1982 and publisher of 30,000 free copies each week, which can be found in red boxes around the city of Eugene—is a marker of the closure of local news outlets across the US, which one industry expert calls a "profound" loss. "Instead of having the healthy kind of community connections that local journalism helps create, we're losing that and becoming communities of strangers," Tim Gleason, former dean of the University of Oregon's journalism school, tells the AP. "And the result of that is that we fall into these partisan camps."

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That's not to say the Eugene Weekly staff has given up: Some have banded together to keep publishing articles online, without getting paid, and a GoFundMe that launched in the newspaper's name had raised nearly $50,000 as of Tuesday morning. "The damage is more than most small businesses can bear," the paper notes in its op-ed about the situation. "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." The suspected embezzler, meanwhile, who worked for the paper for about four or five years, has been fired, according to Mortensen, and local police are investigating. (More newspaper stories.)