Automated email responses from accounts belonging to four senior newsroom staff at the Tulsa World indicated that they were no longer employed by Lee Enterprises, the World’s parent company, as of Friday morning.
Jason Collington confirmed via text message that he had decided to leave the Tulsa World “rather than make deeper cuts in the newsroom.” Collington previously held the newsroom’s lead job as executive editor.
“Please keep the incredible people in the newsroom in mind today,” Collington texted.
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The extent to which the rest of the newsroom was affected remains unclear. Automated responses from email accounts associated with multiple senior employees indicated that the employees were no longer employed by Lee as of Friday afternoon.
Included among them were longtime arts and culture reporter James Watts, news columnist Ginnie Graham and assistant city editor Mary Bishop. Clicking Bishop’s, Watts’ and Graham’s bylines on the Tulsa World’s website results in a 404 message.
Graham and Watts first began working for the World in the 1990s and have long been mainstays for the paper.
The auto-emails referred recipients to Marc Chase, who is listed on LinkedIn as the Midwest News Director for Lee Enterprises, the newspaper group that owns the Tulsa World. Calls and emails made to Chase were not returned as of publication Friday afternoon.
Lee Enterprises purchased the Tulsa World from Berkshire Hathaway in 2020. Berkshire Hathaway purchased the World from the Lorton family in 2013.
The average American county has experienced a 75% decrease in local journalists since 2002, according to Muck Rack’s Local Journalist Index. Tulsa County registers 6.2 local journalists per 100k residents, which is below the 8.2 figure considered “catastrophic.”
