NEW YORK (AP) — Tribune Publishing Company, which owns some of the most storied newspapers in American journalism, said Wednesday that it is closing the newsrooms at five of them, including New York’s Daily News and The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland.
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The company said the newspapers — including the Orlando Sentinel in Florida, The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and the Carroll County Times in Maryland — will continue to be published with employees working from home as they have been during the coronavirus pandemic.
Employees were told they would be working at home until at least January 2021.
“As we progress through the pandemic and as needs change, we will reconsider our need for physical offices,” a spokesperson for the Chicago-based company, Max Reinsdorf, said via email. “We will keep employees informed of decisions as they are made.”
The Daily News, once the newspaper with the largest circulation in the country, has been in financial trouble for years and was sold to The Tribune Publishing Company for $1 in 2017 by New York real estate developer and media mogul Mortimer B. Zuckerman. The new owner cut the newsroom staff in half.
Its offices at 4 New York Plaza in Manhattan will be formally closed as of Wednesday and staff will be given until Oct. 30 to retrieve personal items, a human resources executive at The Daily News said in a letter to employees obtained by The Associated Press.
“With no clear path forward in terms of returning to work, and as the company evaluates its real estate needs in light of health and economic conditions brought about by the pandemic, we have made the difficult decision to permanently close the office,” said Reinsdorf, referring to The Daily News in a statement about the newsroom closures.
The Capital Gazette in Maryland’s capital moved to its current newsroom about a year after the June 2018 mass shooting in which a gunman who had a history of harassing the newspaper’s journalists killed five employees. Before that, for nearly a year, the newspaper’s staff worked in a temporary newsroom at the University of Maryland’s Capital News Service bureau in Annapolis.
In a June 8 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Tribune Publishing said it had withheld three months of rent payments for “a majority of its facilities and requested rent relief from the lessors in various forms,” including lease terminations, the Orlando Sentinel reported Wednesday.
The Tribune Publishing Company also publishes the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, Virginia’s Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot, and the Hartford Courant.
Very sad news indeed.
It’s a business decision. Why pay costs associated with an office location when the product can be produced remotely? The company I work for is doing the same thing. Our office lease is up next spring and there are strong hints that we’re never going back except to get our personal items.
Let’s hope ny times and cnn close down.
Wonderful news . A vicious anti Trump toilet paper company dropped dead.
I prefer nypost and fox news not fake news
The NY Daily News should permanently close once and for all, as it is a trash newspaper.
With Readership numbers down, Reliability in their reporting near zero And trust nonexistent it’s no wonder they’re going out of business
And no relief in their fake news reporting yes they’re going out of burnet
As per the once proud grey lady they’re readership is way down if not for foreign financing and selling off they’re valuable property they’d by out of business as well
More available office space in Manhattan. Together with the new rent control law Nyc real estate going down the drain. Combine that with all the police stuff And you can thank our stupid politicians for destroying the financial capital of the world.
Fake news and they wonder why no one buys their paper’s
What actual news in in the NY Post besides crime stories and celeb gossip. Why are there always inappropriate photos of women in the Post?
Fox programming is 99% commentary, not news.
Where to you get real news from?