Oakland, CA daily mainstay the Oakland Tribune will cease publication as part of a massive effort by publisher Bay Area News Group to reorganize its media properties. The daily newspaper, which was first published in 1874, will run its final edition on April 4.
Bay Area News Group will fold the Oakland Tribune into a forthcoming daily publication titled the East Bay Times. Three other Bay-area BANG publications — the Contra Costa Times, the Daily Review and the Argus — will also be consolidated into this new publication. The East Bay Times and its accompanying website, eastbaytimes.com, is slated to appear April 5.
BANG on Tuesday announced that it would also combine its South Bay properties, flagship paper the San Jose Mercury News — which was founded in 1851 — with the San Mateo County Times. Those newspapers will be rebranded as new regional publication, Mercury News. That newspaper will also debut April 5.
Bay Area News Group, which remains the largest newspaper publisher in the San Francisco Bay Area, also publishes the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the Marin Independent Journal, and 27 community newspapers throughout the South and East Bay region. The publisher in a statement said the rebranded media properties would focus on regional and community news, and that the consolidation effort is part “of an ongoing transformation to make BANG more responsive to its print and digital audiences, streamlining production while improving news gathering and presentation to provide readers with news when they want it and where they want it.”
Current subscribers to the Oakland Tribune, the Argus and the Daily Review will receive each Friday a weekly insert bearing the mastheads of those respective publications, whose content will focus solely on local news items.
Buyouts and layoffs are expected to accompany the rebrand. The SFGate reported Tuesday that the Bay Area News Group plans to slash approximately 20 percent of its newsroom staff, which currently numbers about 200. Buyouts will be offered to newsroom employees who have been with the publisher for at least 20 years, according to SFGate.
Bay Area News Group is owned by New York-based newspaper management company Digital First Media, which also owns the Denver Post, the New Haven Register, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Monterey County Herald, the Salt Lake Tribune, the (San Bernardino) Sun and the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
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