Chronicle Herald to stop printing Sunday paper

A union representative has confirmed that the Sunday Herald won't be around much longer.

The publication of the Chronicle Herald's Sunday paper started in the late 1990s.

Ingrid Bulmer, president of the union representing unionized staff, said no job losses are expected, but they just heard the news on Wednesday and have yet to have detailed meetings with management.

Publication of the Sunday paper is expected to cease in mid to late April.

This is not the first cut for the Chronicle Herald, Canada's oldest newspaper.

Citing increasing operating costs and declining advertising revenues, the newspaper gave layoff notices to almost a quarter of its newsroom staff in February of 2009.

Jennifer Punch, the paper's senior manager of marketing and consumer sales, would neither confirm nor deny that an announcement to stop printing the Sunday edition has been made. "If we’ve made an internal announcement, it would have been internal. And we’ve not made an announcement to that effect, publicly," she said. Punch would say only that there were some "exciting new changes in the planning stages here at the Herald. We know it will positively affect all of our products from online to print and we know it will be great news for our readers, our advertisers and our employees."

The Halifax Herald Limited, owned by the Dennis family of Halifax, publishes the paper, which is one of the last independently owned newspapers in Canada.