Is there more bad news waiting for the New Jersey newspapers?
Lee Enterprises, which owns The Press of Atlantic City, has cut $1 million from the editorial budget of The Buffalo News, once the jewel of its newspaper chain and one of the 25 largest daily newspapers in the United States, Poynter reported today.
For the first two months of 2023, Lee cut veteran reporting, eliminated open positions, stopped hiring new journalists, and then eliminated five positions in their design office. This was followed by closing their production facility and outsourcing their newspaper printing to Advance Publications in Cleveland.
Since then, the union leaders have not been able to hold a meeting with the management.
Lee, which owns 77 daily newspapers in 26 states, will cut 400 jobs in 2024 and Announced earlier this year that their employees will be required to take unpaid leave.
The Atlantic City Press stopped home delivery of newspapers this month and cut the number of print editions to three days a week. They closed their local printing plant nine years ago and have outsourced production to their Janet facility in Morris County for the past five years.
Although local news is scarce — much of what they have in their digital version remains behind a paywall — Today’s newspaper carried five pages of legal advertisements.
Founded by future New Jersey Governor Walter Edge in the 1890s, the newspaper was sold to Berkshire Hathaway in 2013 and then to Lee in 2020.