Clave and Clave Digital to fold

SANTO DOMINGO. The economic crisis that the country is going through might be the reason for the closure of Clave Digital and the weekly newspaper Clave, which will end today their operations of reporting on national events.

According to some employees the media will only operate until today. The photograph on the cover of Clave will be a farewell group photo of all the employees. Meanwhile, Miguel Lopez, the general administrator for the Media Team Dominicana enterprise, responsible for the weekly edition of Clave and Clave Digital, answered the question regarding the shutdown of the company by saying "as of today we are open".

In the meantime, several employees were seen carrying their belongings in boxes and one of them said, "I am only taking what is mine".

"We are gathering, picking up, yesterday we were invited to take a group photograph on the steps, that is our farewell, and it will be the last cover", said an employee that asked that we not publish his name.

When reporters from the Diario Libre tried to go inside the press room, Olga Marte, the assistant to Fausto Rosario, the paper's director, said that all of the journalists were in a meeting discussing today's cover.

Yesterday the newspaper's directors held a meeting with the employees of the company and told them, officially, about the shut down, and that their separation packages would be given out shortly.

According to sources, the closure is due to "serious economic problems" that the Media Team Dominicana, part of the Hazoury Group, is undergoing.

One employee of the group said that the administration of the company has communicated that "we are dealing with a "see you later", but we know that the closure is definitive and we were told that they would call us when things got back to normal.

The weekly paper Clave has been circulating since 2005.