McClatchy Media Company owns several prominent newspapers including the Miami Herald, Kansas City Star and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Late last week it laid off 90 reporters and editors and cited falling revenue.
The Miami Herald lost the entire writing staff of El Nuevo Herald. The cuts eliminated more than one-third of the Herald's editorial staff.
In Kentucky, the Lexington Herald-Leader lost 13 journalists, a majority of its reporters.
The Sacramento Bee eliminated its entire three-person sports staff.
McClatchy owns newspapers on 14 states, from coast to coast and in the deep South and Midwest.
Tim Graham of Media Research Center says it's a prestigious brand.
“It wasn't very long ago the McClatchy newspapers had a Washington bureau that was winning Pulitzer Prizes writing critical articles about George W. Bush,” he said.
The advent of the internet and more recently artificial intelligence has thrown the journalistic landscape into chaos, and Graham says that was an issue in this particular round of layoffs.
“The reporting about McClatchy underlined that there was a controversy inside their newsrooms about the use of AI and that there were reporters who were going to decline to let their bylines be used if they were going to be rewritten or re-summarized by AI,” Graham said.
He says local news coverage has been hardest hit. But even national outlets have resorted to the "if it bleeds, it leads" school of journalism.
“What often leads is a plane crash, the weather, visuals you can't ignore, and obviously they've noticed that those sorts of things keep people from turning the channel.”
Graham says over the past several generations the attention span of news consumers has gotten shorter and outlets have started chasing clicks, not truth.
“So one of the problems with the news business is that local news just doesn't click.”
