![]() ![]() Once free from the liabilities that have been holding our operations back, we hope that they will be able to maintain the high level of journalism our customers and this community have come to expect.” Shumate said: “Our hope is that Wheeling Newspapers will hire all of our employees. Trip Shumate, identified previously as the President and Chief Financial Officer of Charleston Newspapers, the parent company of the Gazette-Mail, echoed concern that the jobs of current Gazette-Mail employees may be in jeopardy due to the pending Chapter 11 action. If the sale is completed, as speculation would have it, Ogden Newspapers will then own West Virginia’s largest (Charleston Gazette-Mail) and oldest (Wheeling’s Intelligencer) newspapers We firmly believe in the importance of community-based journalism, and we look forward to the opportunity to work with the excellent team of journalists and professionals at the Gazette-Mail”. We have a high level of respect for the newspaper’s proud heritage and realize it has served for many years as an extremely important institution in the state of West Virginia. In a statement released on January 29th, Robert Nutting said:“We’re extremely proud to be the prospective publisher of the Charleston Gazette-Mail. The Nutting family are also the current owners of the Pittsburg Pirates major league baseball team and the Seven Springs Mountain Resort, an all-season resort, located in Pennsylvania. Robert Nutting, a fourth-generation family member, is the President and CEO of the newspaper enterprise. Ogden Newspapers was started as a family business by the Nutting family of West Virginia. Ogden has newspapers in Wheeling, Elkins, Martinsburg, Weirton and Parkersburg, West Virginia. Ogden Newspapers reportedly owns over forty (40) newspapers across the nation, with an unknown number of those in the state of West Virginia. Other reports emerging in the past several days reveal that, at present, the highest bidder appears to be a West Virginia newspaper conglomerate, the Wheeling, West Virginia-based Ogden Newspapers. The last line of Chilton Shumate’s letter to the paper’s employees “might be”, according to one commentator,“…an early signal that the Chapter 11 reorganization plan may include the sale of the Gazette-Mail to new ownership interests.” According to recent reports, the newspaper said buyers are actively being sought. At the end of this process, we will be letting go of that passion.”Ĭhilton Shumate’s husband is Trip Shumate, the President and Chief Financial Officer of Charleston Newspapers, the parent company of the Charleston Gazette-Mail and the entity that plans to file a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition. Gazette-Mail Publisher Susan Chilton Shumate, said in a letter to the paper’s employees: “The Gazette-Mail has been my family’s passion for the last century… To follow in the footsteps of Ned Chilton, my father, and Betty Chilton, my mother, as publisher of the of this paper has been a tremendous honor for me and my family. Eyre won a prestigious Pulitzer Prize in April, 2017, for his investigative reporting on West Virginia’s opioid crisis. On the list of employees who received the WARN Act notification is Journalist Eric Eyre. The WARN Act operates to protect employees, their families and communities by requiring most employers with 100 or more employees to provide sixty (60) calendar days advance notice to employees of the closing of operations in a business, or of mass layoffs.Īccording to a Gazette-Mail press release, the newspaper presently has a roster of 209 employees including journalists, production and distribution workers, and administrative staff. ![]() The act was passed in August 1988 and became effective in February, 1989. Such notices are issued pursuant to The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988 (the “WARN Act”). The report of the pending bankruptcy filing included news that the parent company of the newspaper, Charleston Newspapers, issued a “WARN” notice to all newspaper employees on Monday, January 29th. ![]() Informed sources say the plan was to file the requisite Chapter 11 bankruptcy paperwork on Tuesday, January, 30th.If a Chapter 11 filing is commenced, West Virginia’s largest newspaper could be sold coming out of bankruptcy or otherwise liquidated. The actual filing of bankruptcy pleadings has not been confirmed. One of West Virginia’s oldest newspapers, the Charleston Gazette-Mail announced on Monday, January 29, 2018, that a Chapter 11 Bankruptcy filing “is imminent”. ![]()
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