NEW BEDFORD – SouthCoast Media Group, parent of The Standard-Times and the Hathaway group of weekly newspapers, has laid off five full-time and nine part-time employees and eliminated two vacant slots, paring a total of 16 positions.

“Nothing is harder in business than eliminating the jobs of valuable, hard-working employees,” President and Publisher William T. Kennedy said in a report on SouthCoastToday.com.

“But we owe it to our community of readers and advertisers to ensure that SouthCoast Media remains strong financially as well as journalistically,” he said. And in light of recent declines in advertising revenue, “we simply could no longer sustain the burden of the payroll costs we were carrying.”

The company employs about 225 people. Most of the May 29 cuts came from the newsroom, which lost three full-time and three part-time employees, SouthCoast said. The advertising and marketing departments also were affected.

The local layoffs are part of a round of “involuntary reductions in force” by parent Ottaway Newspapers Inc., the community media subsidiary of Dow Jones & Co. (NYSE: DJ). Those cuts will amount to less than 5 percent of the work force companywide, Ottaway has said.

Kennedy said the layoffs had nothing to do with a possible sale of the Ottaway group. “While we have all heard plenty of rumors, we are still part of Dow Jones and News Corp.,” he said, “and as far as I know, there has been no signed agreement to change that.”

The SouthCoast Media Group is the publisher of The Standard-Times, the Hathaway group of weekly newspapers and SouthCoastToday.com. It is a division of Campbell Hall, N.Y.-based Ottaway Newspapers Inc.

Ottaway Newspapers Inc. – the local media group of Dow Jones & Co. (NYSE: DJ) – is the publisher of eight daily and 14 weekly newspapers, in seven states, plus their Web sites. For more information, visit www.ottaway.com/news.