Anewspaper in Eugene, Oregon was recently forced to stop printing. Was it because of a downturn in the publishing industry? A new competitor? A natural disaster? Nope. It was because of embezzlement.
According to this report in The New York Times, management at The Eugene Weekly — a 40-year-old publication with a circulation of over 30,000 readers — discovered a mountain of unpaid bills and unfunded retirement accounts thanks to a former financial staffer who had taken tens of thousands of dollars sometime during their five year period with the paper. The newspaper’s editor Camilla Mortensen said inaccuracies were found in the newspaper’s bookkeeping, and the “trusted” financial staffer who was heavily involved in the paper’s finances had used its bank account to pay themselves $90,000 since 2022.
