The Newhouse family sold the 182-year-old daily The Times-Picayune and its website, nola.com, to a scrappy New Orleans competitor, and the entire staff is being laid off. That has stirred worries across the other papers in the family’s Advance Publications empire.

A total of 161 staff members are being laid off, according to a WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act) notice filed with the Louisiana Workforce Commission, which listed 65 reporter and editor jobs in the bloodbath.

John and Dathel Georges, the husband-and-wife team that owns the rival New Orleans Advocate, are buying The Times-Picayune from Newhouse’s Advance Local, which has owned it since 1962.

The Advocate plans to publish a seven-days-a-week paper using both brands on the masthead starting in early June and will merge both websites under nola.com.

“Could this happen to the Staten Island Advance, Jersey Journal or Star-Ledger?” asked one worried source, referring to metropolitan newspapers owned by the family that also owns the glitzy but struggling Condé Nast.

Randy Siegel, chief executive of Advance Local, said the company does not intend to sell any other papers. “This was a one-off,” Siegel told The Post. “We’re all terribly sad about the outcome.”

Stunned Times-Picayune staffers heard they were being laid off late Thursday.

One reporter, Haley Correll, was in New York City accepting a prestigious journalism award when she heard the news. “Last night, I stood in Pulitzer Hall at Columbia and accepted The Dart Award,” she tweeted. “Today, I ugly cried on an airplane as I heard @NOLAnews was bought and we’re all losing our jobs in 60 days. The whole newsroom.”

John Georges is a millionaire grocery wholesaler who owns the French Quarter restaurant Galatoire’s and has made unsuccessful runs for governor of Louisiana and mayor of New Orleans.

The Times-Picayune reported weekday circulation of only 83,860 and weekend circulation of 88,538, compared with a 257,000 circulation before Hurricane Katrina flooded the city in 2005.

Advocate Publisher Dan Shea says he will hire some of the laid-off staffers but could not say how many. “Virtually everyone at the Advocate worked at the Times-Picayune at one time,” he said. “We want to make sure we do the right thing.”