Virginian-Pilot Closes Port Folio & Mix, Lays Off 30

 

NORFOLK, VA (February 20, 2009) – The Virginian-Pilot will lay off 30 more workers and discontinue the publication of its 26-year-old free arts and entertainment weekly, Port Folio Weekly, and a free monthly multicultural paper, Mix, the newspaper's publisher and president announced today.

Publisher Maurice Jones said the paper might consider reopening the weekly when the economy improves, but that both publications were losing money. Jones said the two publications didn't have enough advertising revenue to continue publishing them.

The layoffs are 10 workers from Port Folio and Mix, 8 from the paper's online operations, six from the Pilot's newsroom, and six from other newspaper departments.

The newspaper just recently hired Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Preston Gannaway away from The Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and she expects to start working at the Pilot at the end of March. Gannaway had worked at the Rocky for about one year since winning the Pulitzer for a story she shot at her previous paper, The Concord Monitor.

In 2008 about 12 percent of the Pilot's workforce was eliminated when the paper cut about 150 jobs and closed down Link, a free daily aimed at young adults. They have also reduced the number of pages they print in the daily newspaper by about 8 percent.

 

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