Postmedia Network Canada Corporation announced Tuesday it will lay off Ottawa Sun employees and merged the newspaper with the Ottawa Citizen.
“The Sun will be cutting 12 people and the rest will merge with the Citizen,” said Alison Mah, an assistant digital editor at the Ottawa Citizen. “The Citizen and the Sun will still be two distinct brands…and the merger will be effective tomorrow.”
The changes come less than a week after Postmedia announced its aim to reduce $80-million in costs by mid-2017.
Postmedia employees from Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto and Ottawa announced their firings on Twitter, including Matt Day, Mike Sutherland-Shaw, Chris Hofley and Corey Larocque from the Ottawa Sun. Chris Selley, a columnist for the National Post, tweeted that in total there were “approximately 90 job cuts.”
Mah tweeted, “no one at the Citizen has been laid off,” and in an interview with Centretown News she added buyouts will be offered to Citizen employees in the coming days.
According to the CBC Online, in addition to the changes in Ottawa, Postmedia is merging the newsrooms in each of Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton. However, in an internal memo Postmedia president and CEO, Paul Godfrey said: “We will continue to operate separate brands in each of these markets.”
Postmedia has yet to reply to Centretown News for comment.