Hope that “things would be different” at Lee Enterprises under Florida billionaire David Hoffmann have been dashed with “a round of redundancies”.

The expanded Lee group includes the Omaha World-Herald, brought to it by Warren Buffett as part of his BH Media and then packaged with existing mastheads and financed at nine per cent.

February’s US$50 million (A$70.24 million) deal, in which Hoffmann became majority shareholder and chairman, released the business from that – albeit at a lower selling price – and raised hopes. No matter Lee had paid $140 million cash for BH’s 30 daily and 49 weekly papers, and Hoffmann was picking up the expanded group for less than half that.

The optimism was based around front-page profiles strutting ‘New hope for local news’ and promising renewed investment in the chain – one repeated in interviews, during quarterly earnings calls and in a set of profiles that ran on the front page of every Lee paper.

Poynter’s Angela Fu says it’s not clear how many, but editors and copy editors have been affected, with “at least two papers” losing top editors. “Some papers have also cut travel and freelance budgets,” she says.

“While the scale of the layoffs appears to be much smaller than past rounds of mass cuts, they raise questions about the plans of a man who has repeatedly boasted about his ability to avoid laying off employees at his businesses.”

In February, he had called layoffs a “bad, bad, bad word”, according to Gateway Journalism Review, a message he repeated to Forbes.

Fu mentions contradictions between those statements and the “modest layoffs”he talked about in an interview with the Seattle Times last year, although she acknowledges “all of the journalists… identified as being laid off had ‘editor’ in their title”, but some still wrote articles.

A Labor Day weekend column by Hoffmann, lamenting “the decline of local news” has been seen as “a slap in the face” in some affected markets, with readers reported to be cancelling subscriptions.

Pictured: Concord, North Carolina, where former editor of the Independent Tribune, Mark Plemmons was laid off in August