Three editors and a creative director have been let go by weekly newspaper Chelsea Now. Among the casualties are former Associate Editor Larry Lerner and Arts Eeditor Nicole Davis.

The layoffs came at an interesting point for the paper. Over the past several months, Chelsea Now has been balancing coverage of controversial real estate issues (check out their coverage of the Chelsea Hotel scandal and of High Line redevelopment efforts) with an ever-increasing amount of advertising from, natch, real estate companies.

Local site blogchelsea speculates that Lerner's removal was due to pressure from management to tone down on real estate stories. However, we're seeing increasing indications of mismanagement at Chelsea Now parent company Community Media LLC — ad sales for their publications (including Downtown Express, Gay City and The Villager) have been taking a beating over the past few years while community weeklies printed by other publishers have been thriving. Hell, just take a look at Manhattan Media — the Our Town publisher ended up buying the New York Press.

We spoke to Lerner, who confirmed that he was no longer at Chelsea Now and that the reason given was "economics." In the meantime, we'd recommend checking out his portfolio — the guy's got chops.