Western Communications, the parent company of The Bulletin, the Redmond Spokesman and five other newspapers, today announced that it will reduce its number of employees.
The reductions, which will be accomplished through attrition and layoffs, affect less than 10 percent of the company’s nearly 400 workers.
“We avoided layoffs for four and half years through tough economic times, and came through a difficult bankruptcy with a solid plan that stabilized the company," said WesCom President and Bulletin Publisher Gordon Black.
The smaller workforce is the direct result of the immediate loss of revenue from foreclosure notices, according to WesCom.
Oregon, like a majority of states, has both judicial and non-judicial foreclosure processes.
The non-judicial process spares the banks and delinquent homeowners the time and expense of a lengthy court-supervised resolution. It also requires notices to be published in a newspaper like The Bulletin.
But new legal and legislative requirements recently caused banks to abandon the non-judicial process and virtually eliminate the foreclosure notices from Oregon’s newspapers at this time.
In the case of The Bulletin, the absence of those notices has resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly losses, according to Wescom.
“This was a difficult but unavoidable decision, which, ironically, comes at a time when circulation at The Bulletin has continued to grow," Black said.
