A despicable way to handle closings and layoffs

In case you missed it, you have got to take a look at how a shrinking chain of hyperlocal websites handled closings and layoffs earlier this week. As reported by Gawker’s Camille Dodero, Daily Voice chairman Carll Tucker sent out a company-wide email last Friday promising some pretty exciting news:

Monday morning we will share with you the news about where we’re going and how we’re going to get there. The news is good — but you’ll need to sit tight while we finalize our plans. Check your email about our company-wide phone conference early Monday morning.

I am pumped about the prospect of working with you to build a great company.

Monday comes around, and the Daily Voice announced it would shut down all 11 of its sites in Central Massachusetts. Widespread layoffs were reported at the company’s sites in New York and Connecticut as well. Despicable — not the downsizing, which may have been necessary, but the deceit.

“They bought us a year and a half ago and made a lot of stupid decisions,” Jennifer Lord Paluzzi, the laid-off managing editor of the Grafton Daily Voice, told Walter Bird Jr. of Worcester Magazine. “They would offer to put us up in hotels. All this stuff that had nothing to do with community news.”

It’s a shame, because the Central Massachusetts story was an inspiring one. Paluzzi, laid off by the MetroWest Daily News, started the Greater Grafton Blog. She later teamed up with a businessman named Jack Schofield, and together they built a network of hyperlocal sites in and around Grafton, selling out to the company that became the Daily Voice in 2011. I brought Paluzzi in to speak with my students a few years ago, and every so often I’d get a message from her telling me she was hiring.

Paluzzi has revived her blog, but it’s not clear what will come next. “We’ll get reacquainted after I take a bit of a rest,” she wrote on Monday. “I think I’ve earned it.”