West Virginia Owner Says Newspapers Won't Close

By: The founder of an embattled chain of West Virginia newspapers says the weeklies are not closing, but they are restructuring, and deep staff cuts are expected.

Despite media reports to the contrary, Dan Butcher insisted Tuesday that he never explicitly said the Lincoln Standard, Boone Standard, Cabell Standard and Putnam Standard newspapers were closing.

The owner of the Lincoln Standard Co. said a poorly worded e-mail he sent to management, and his subsequent unavailability while on a family vacation to clarify his message made it difficult for people to accurately discern what he meant.

"We knew we would do radical restructuring and a significant number of jobs would be lost,'' Butcher told the Associated Press in a telephone interview Tuesday. That's why he says he wrote a warning e-mail to his management that said he was "suspending operations and (didn't) have plans to bring that back.''

"I created an information vacuum, but I didn't anticipate the firestorm that followed,'' he added.

Interpreted by some staff members as a notice of closure, Butcher's e-mail was actually intended as a green light for them to look elsewhere for work. Butcher says he thought it was only fair to give them warning because "their jobs are their livelihoods'' and he was working on a plan that would cut the 70-person staff down to 20 employees.

"Essentially, it is a dramatic reduction of personnel,'' Butcher said. "It's unfortunate that this got played out the way it did in a rush to get a story out. But the idea was to call a timeout.''

The newspaper group has been renamed the West Virginia Standard Co., to reflect its regional work, and the papers will be operated out of central offices in Culloden.

Despite the reduced staff, Butcher plans to expand publication with a new Logan edition of the paper in February. The West Virginia Standard, a free weekly mailer, will be discontinued.

Butcher says that his new staff will be finalized within a week, and he will offer severance packages in accordance with state labor law, typically two weeks pay for each employee of the publications he has operated for a year or less.

One reason for downsizing was cutthroat advertising competition in the region, Butcher said.

"You have to be able to sell the value of a publication, and the market in West Virginia is so geared towards 'how low can you go' that it makes that difficult,'' Butcher said. "A significant amount of the competition in that Huntington-Charleston market is that they'll undercut your prices. That's not healthy, long term, for everybody.''

Butcher says he intends to lure advertisers by offering them advertising in all five of his papers for a single price. The newspapers have 4,800 subscribers, are sold in 300 locations and the newspapers' Web site gets 5,000 hits a week, he said.

"I'm very excited we'll be able to remain and be aggressive newspapers in those areas,'' Butcher said.

Still, the layoffs are not something he is taking lightly.

"I don't sleep well at night knowing that you're messing with people's lives, so to speak. It's not an easy task to do, it's a necessity.''