Newspaper employees begin losing jobs

Earlier this week, it was announced that the Department of Justice had cleared the way for the merger between Stephens Media LLC and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Inc.

Yesterday, the fate of many employees’ jobs was revealed and as expected, there were redundancy-based layoffs. Ozarks Unbound‘s Christopher Spencer has been updating a list of those let go and among them are a handful of Northwest Arkansas Times employees whose primary focus was on Fayetteville.

Among them was Fayetteville City Hall reporter Robin Mero. It appears as though Skip Descant, her counterpart at The Morning News, has secured the position. At around 8:00 pm last night, Descant sent the following message on Twitter:

As of Sunday, I’ll serve as the Fayetteville City Hall reporter for the Northwest Arkansas Times.

The companies cited a dramatic drop in advertising revenue as the primary reason for the need to merge their operations in Northwest Arkansas.