Dark days at the T-S. The county’s only daily will go forward with a plan to eliminate the news section’s entire copy desk beginning in the middle of next month, the Outpost has learned. At the same time, it has laid off veteran Times-Standard reporter and Tri-City Weekly editor Jessie Faulkner.

The moves come as the venerable broadsheet’s parent company — which was recently rechristened Digital First Media — has scrapped its flagship digital-innovation initiative, “Project Thunderdome,” sparking doom-and-gloom predictions for the future of the chain from industry-watchers.

None of this is exactly what you would call good. Word on the street is that the T-S will be outsourcing layout and copy editing functions to its sister paper in Chico, the Enterprise-Record, but no one seems eager to officially confirm this. Reached this morning for comment, Times-Standard publisher Paula Patton referred all questions to Digital First Media spokesperson Jonathan Cooper, who has a Philadelphia-area phone number. Reached minutes later, Cooper told us to submit our question by email. Emailed seconds thereafter, Cooper has yet to reply.

Meanwhile, former Tri-City editor Jessie Faulkner, who was laid off last week, told the Outpost that she could not comment on her dismissal. 

The death of Digital First’s “Project Thunderdome,” which was designed to lead the company forward into the post-newsprint era, led last week to a raft of predictions that the chain’s newspapers would not be far behind. (See here, here and here for a taste.) The general sense is that Alden Capital Group, the hedge fund that ended up in control of what was formerly the MediaNews chain, is cooling on the news biz. Why name your company “Digital First Media” then axe your big digital-first project? Industry analyst Ken Doctor bets that Alden Capital cuts bait on the chain — either wholesale or piecemeal — in the very near future.