Eugene Weekly has been the city’s alternative weekly paper since 1982. As editor Camilla Mortensen wrote recently, “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.”
However, one thing the Eugene Weekly can’t do at the moment is print the paper. The paper announced late last year that they had suffered a huge blow: alleged theft and mismanagement by a longtime employee amounting to a $70,000 debt to their printer and at least $90,000 in fraudulent payments. The entire 10-person staff was laid off three days before Christmas and the paper was not printed for the first time in more than 20 years.
Mortensen recently joined OPB’s “Think Out Loud” to talk about the latest developments. The excerpts below have been edited for length and clarity.
On the scope of the crisis
“[In] mid-December, we were getting some questions about closing the books and not getting any answers on it. And then when this former employee was out of the office is when things started to become very apparent that things were deeply wrong, and that’s when our tech guy got on the computer to look at some of the accounting and realized that right off the top, he could see that there was at least $90,000 to $100,000 of checks and reimbursements to this person. …And I looked at my retirement account. Somebody mentioned that they had noticed something weird and there’s been no payments into my retirement account all year. So we’re just, we just keep finding more and more like the depths of it. We don’t even really know yet … It could be as high as $200,000.”
On why it took so long to discover the theft and mismanagement
“Ironically, some of the systems we had in place to protect the integrity of the paper and the integrity of the product, of the journalism that we’re doing, I think, were the same things that led to this. So as the editor, I don’t handle finances. I know what my budget is. I know what I pay the freelancers, but I don’t handle finances because if I were to know, for example, how much an ad costs or if a community member was contributing money or something, the fear would be that it would bias our reporting. …And so one of the first things we’re doing is we’re going to bring someone in, as soon as we can afford it, to bring someone in to sort of just look at the operations and be like, how do we not do this again ever?”
On where the police investigation stands
“I believe the financial crimes unit has it now. A lot of it is up to forensic accountants going through and just looking at our books and seeing all the places that things happened, over the past probably several years.”
On how the 10 members of the laid-off staff are doing
“Laying off is not usually something I’ve ever really had to do and to tell, like, my calendar editor, my arts editor, my reporter, my copy editor, who operates on a shoestring, like, ‘I’m so sorry, we have no money. I have to lay you off,’ … it was just horrible. And I guess one of the things that made it less horrible is they were just so amazing and they’re just like, ‘Well, if you’re fighting, we’re fighting.’ So we’re going to, we’re not going to go down without a fight.”
What fighting means
“We’ve still put out a very small digital paper. So, it’s not what our readers want. Our readers are very print-focused. When you discover … how much something means to the community like this paper does, you can’t just take that away. So putting out a digital paper, fundraising, just doing everything we can to get this paper back.”
How the community has responded so far
“Immediately like the next morning, there were people coming to our office, which technically was closed, but we went ahead and opened the doors. Coming to the office and doing anything from like, there was a local veterinary facility that knows almost all of us have pets … And they offered to provide medical care for our pets. People have offered food, they have made contributions, they have sent just lovely messages, just anything imaginable. There’s a local restaurant doing a fundraiser. There’s a local pub here in town that’s doing a fundraiser. It’s just unasked. Like, you know what, I asked in the sense that we’re like, please help us. But in the sense that people have just stepped up and been like, ‘Here’s what I’m going to do for you’ has just been just, I guess, reassures me of people’s belief in local independent journalism. … We’ve raised at least $100,000 in a week, which is just mind-blowing to me. It’s still a pretty big gap, but at the same time, if we can get ourselves printing, if we can start selling advertising again, then I’m, I’m feeling more and more like we really do have a chance.”
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