Tribune Publishing Company, which has some of the most well-preserved newspapers in American journalism, said Wednesday that it is closing the rooms at five of them, including New York’s Daily News and The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland.
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 at home, as they did during the pandemic of coronavirus.
Employees were told they will be working from home until at least January 2021.
“As we continue through the pandemic and as needs change, we will reconsider our need for physical offices,” a Chicago company spokesman Max Reinsdorf said via email. “We will keep employees informed about 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 in 2017 for $ 1 in 2017 by New York real estate developer and media mogul Mortimer B. Zuckerman. The new owner cut the staff of the newsroom in half.
The offices at 4 New York Plaza in Manhattan will be formally closed from Wednesday and staff will be given until Oct. 30 to pick up personal items, a personnel manager at The Daily News said in a letter to employees received by The Associated Press.
“With no clear path forward in terms of returning to work, and because the company assesses its real estate in light of health and economic conditions caused by the pandemic, we have made the difficult decision to close the office permanently, said Reinsdorf, referring to The Daily News in a statement on the closures of the newsroom.
The Capital Gazette in the capital of Maryland moved to its current newsroom about a year after the massage game in June 2018 in which a gunman who had a history of harassing the newspaper’s journalists killed five employees. Before that, the newspaper’s staff worked for nearly a year in a temporary newsroom at the Bureau of News of the University of Maryland in Annapolis.
Tribune Publishing said in a June 8 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it had withheld three months of rent payments for “a majority of its facilities and asked for lease payments in various forms,” including lease terminations, the Orlando reported. Sentinel 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.
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