Once the Chocolate Pig closed, the paper was in trouble.

Doyle Murphy, the editor in chief of Riverfront Times, a 43-year-old weekly in St. Louis, knew how much the publication depended on ads from the Chocolate Pig, Beast Butcher & Block, the Pat Connolly Tavern and many other restaurants not far from the paper’s headquarters on North 21st Street. Those businesses went dark last week, after the city announced restrictions on dining out to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

“These are people who have supported the paper for years,” Mr. Murphy said in an interview. “That’s when we realized we were going to have to take drastic steps, if we had any hope of coming out of this on the other side.”

Mr. Murphy, who said he had never laid off anyone, told five newsroom employees last week that they were being let go. The skeleton crew putting out a smaller version of Riverfront Times consists of himself and a web editor, as well as the paper’s music editor and a freelance food critic, who both insisted on working without pay.

In an article on the day of the layoffs, Mr. Murphy described the pandemic as “a nearly perfect weapon against alternative weeklies.”