The Charleston Gazette-Mail is declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It is expected Wheeling Newspapers will become the next owner of the West Virginia newspaper.

In April 2017, the Gazette-Mail and reporter Eric Eyre received a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting on the state’s opioid crisis.

Charleston Newspapers, the current owner of the Gazette-Mail, issued a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) notice Monday afternoon, signaling potential layoffs could exceed 50 employees. Charleston Newspapers has 206 employees, according to the newspaper.

“Our hope is that Wheeling Newspapers will hire all of our employees,” Trip Shumate, company president and CFO, said in a Gazette-Mail article. “Once free from the liabilities that have been holding our operations back, we hope they will be able to maintain the high level of journalism our customers and this community have come to expect.”

He added, “We will continue to operate as we normally have through these bankruptcy proceedings, and I just want to assure our customers and advertisers that we will continue to conduct business as usual.”

Wheeling Newspapers has placed the highest bid for the newspaper, but an auction will likely take place as part of the bankruptcy process. Other potential buyers will have the opportunity to outbid Wheeling Newspapers.

Wheeling Newspapers is the parent company of the Ogden Newspaper chain. It owns over 40 daily newspapers, including the Wheeling Intelligencer, the Elkins Inter-Mountain, the Martinsburg Journal andthe Parkersburg News and Sentinel in West Virginia.

Robert Nutting, president and CEO of Ogden Newspapers, told The Intelligencer: “Newspapers remain economically strong, and we are pleased that this process is moving forward. We continue to believe that newspapers can have a bright and sustainable future. The Gazette-Mail is an important institution to Charleston and all of West Virginia. I believe that it can, and must, have a bright future.”

Gazette-Mail publisher Susan Chilton Shumate said in a letter to employees that her family has owned the paper for over 100 years, since 1907. Charleston politician, lawyer and businessman William E. Chilton bought the city’s Daily Gazette and renamed it the Charleston Gazette.

Charleston Newspapers combined the Daily Mail and Gazette into the Gazette-Mail in 2015. Before that merger, Charleston was the last city in West Virginia to have more than one daily newspaper, and one of the few cities in the country to have two newspapers.

Slow to transition to the new reality of the media business, local newspapers are some of the hardest hit by the decline in print and digital advertising revenue.

This week, Facebook announced a new algorithm to give greater preference to local news in users’ New Feeds to pull user focus away from low-quality content.

If a user follows a local publisher, that content is now more likely to appear prominently in their feeds, as will local stories shared by a user's friends, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post.