McClatchy Goes Mute

On the morning of the September 10 layoffs, the Idaho Statesman’s editor stood before a newsroom that was about to lose more than half its staff and read from what one employee described as a “corporate script.” According to that person, the editor appeared to have been given a list of affected names from McClatchy leadership that he didn’t know about until the morning of the cuts.

It was, in some ways, the only real communication Statesman staffers would receive about the cuts. The storied, Boise-based publication is set to lose a staggering 13 of its 22 remaining newsroom staffers, Status has learned, including 10 of its remaining 18 union members. It’s a result of sweeping nationwide cuts across McClatchy, the 169-year-old newspaper chain that since 2020 has been owned by the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management. At the end of next week, staffers at the Statesman and dozens of other journalists at McClatchy-owned papers will officially depart their respective outlets.

They are leaving a company that has spent the past year increasingly betting on artificial intelligence to power its newspapers, despite staunch objections from its own journalists. Since the cuts, McClatchy has celebrated new hires for its A.I.-focused “content innovation lab,” while offering almost no explanation of why the layoffs were necessary or what comes next for their newsrooms. And though there’s no indication the cuts were tied to the company’s A.I. ambitions, in newsrooms still reeling from the losses, staffers told me the company’s priorities are hard to miss.

The layoffs were haphazard from the start. Staffers received limited information from McClatchy leadership, and in most cases, their own local newsroom leaders, about just how deep the cuts went. McClatchy has not disclosed the scale of the layoffs, but the News Guild-CWA said McClatchy axed more than 90 unionized employees across 17 publications, representing 40% of the company’s unionized workforce—and the total, including non-unionized employees, is almost certainly more. One laid-off staffer told Status that employees across McClatchy papers had to compare notes among themselves to piece together the scale of the bloodletting. “We could see it was all over the board in ways that are going to be crippling for news coverage in a lot of these communities,” the staffer said.

The day of the layoffs, McClatchy’s vice president of local news, Greg Farmer, said in an internal memo obtained by Status that the company was “reshaping” its newsrooms to better align with consumers, pointing to a 41% decline in consumer revenue. Since then, I’m told, corporate has gone almost completely silent—and, tellingly, a spokesperson did not respond to my request for comment. There has been no company-wide town hall to explain the layoffs or how McClatchy intends to restructure its newsrooms. No follow-up memo from leadership addressing the cuts. And certainly no opportunity for staffers to ask questions.

Instead, McClatchy leadership has left the top editor at each local publication to fend for themselves when it comes to justifying the devastating cuts. And the silence hasn’t been lost on staffers.

“For this round of layoffs, they’ve pursued an even more troubling strategy: Not only are they avoiding accountability to the public by refusing to explain themselves publicly, they’re also avoiding any meaningful explanation in our newsroom,” Ariane Lange, an investigative reporter at The Sacramento Bee and the vice chair of the paper’s news guild, told Status.

Meanwhile, many of the local newsrooms under the McClatchy umbrella haven’t held independent newsroom-wide meetings to address staff concerns after losing significant portions of their ranks. The Sacramento Bee’s executive editor didn’t address the newsroom for days, when he offered to meet with staffers one-on-one about the restructuring, Lange said, who described the company’s communications strategy as “bizarre.” (Editors at the Statesman and Bee did not respond to requests for comment.) Employees at other McClatchy-owned publications, including The Miami Herald and Belleville News-Democrat in Illinois, described similar experiences.

Adding insult to injury, while McClatchy has remained mute about the cuts and how it plans to reposition its local newspapers for the future, the company did find something to celebrate. Less than a week after announcing the layoffs, McClatchy sent an all-staff memo obtained by Status, welcoming a slate of new hires, even though they had officially joined the company in August. The timing struck staffers as particularly jarring. After gutting local newsrooms, corporate leadership was touting hires who had already been on the job for weeks.

Editorial staffers also noticed that three of the hires were for executive positions at the national level, and three were being tapped as directors for the “content innovation lab,” the team involved in the company’s controversial push to integrate A.I. into its newsrooms.

That effort has already become a major flashpoint between McClatchy and its journalists. Earlier this year, the company rolled out its internally developed “Content Scaling Agent,” an A.I. tool designed to take reporters’ existing journalism and generate additional versions of stories for different audiences. Executives pitched the technology as a way to increase publishing volume and reach new readers, but its rollout triggered immediate resistance across McClatchy newsrooms. Journalists at papers including the Sacramento Bee, Miami Herald, Idaho Statesman, and Tacoma News Tribune staged a byline revolt, refusing to allow their names to appear on stories generated by the tool.

Those battles followed months of contentious negotiations over McClatchy’s broader A.I. ambitions. As Status reported in January, union leaders had pushed for guardrails after management sought wide latitude to use the technology, including the ability to publish A.I.-generated stories and generate versions of reporters for audio and video. The fight took on additional urgency after an A.I.-generated Statesman story falsely reported that a Boise brewery was planning to close, causing financial damage to the business.

McClatchy, meanwhile, has completely refused to publicly engage on the controversy. “After corporate launched the CSA A.I. product earlier this year, they declined virtually every request for comment from an outside news organization,” Lange noted. (That included ours.)

To be sure, there is no indication so far that the September layoffs were tied to McClatchy’s implementation of A.I., and none of the unions representing its publications have filed any grievances alleging as much. But the guilds are watching closely. The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild already has two open arbitrations over instances in which the union believes McClatchy violated the A.I. provisions in its contract. “We have very strong protections that say they cannot do that,” one staffer told Status. “So if they’re trying to replace any union work with A.I., they’re going to find themselves at the arbitration table immediately.”

Whether A.I. ultimately fills any of the holes left by the layoffs remains to be seen. What’s already clear is that when dozens of journalists walk out the door next week, the communities they covered will be left with less local journalism, and McClatchy has offered no explanation for how it plans to replace it.

“The main loss is going to be for the communities that these papers are supposed to serve because you can’t cut more than half of the staff and have anything resembling the level of coverage they’re used to,” the Statesman staffer told me. “The communities are going to lose out on that, and that’s the real tragedy.”

• It’s David Ellison’s big week: The industry is on the edge of its seats waiting for the announcement of Skydance’s new leadership team ahead of the Paramount-Warner Bros. deal’s close on Tuesday.
  • Ellison is scheduled to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange this week.
  • There’s still no official word on the status of CNN boss Mark Thompson, whom Ellison had asked to stay on. Spokespeople for Paramount and CNN did not respond to requests for comment on whether a new deal with Thompson has been inked.
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• The Donald Trump administration insisted it has the right to bar CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO from the White House, asking a federal judge to deny the outlets’ request for a court order extending their access. [NYT]
  • Ted Boutrous, an attorney representing the news outlets, said in a statement: “The White House’s filing on Friday shows the President’s ‘ban on the free press’ is indefensible. The law is absolutely clear. The harm to our clients, the First Amendment, and the public as a whole is profound.”
  • The judge’s order requiring the administration to restore journalists’ press passes expires Thursday. The outlets have asked the court to extend that order.
  • 👀 CNN is scheduled as the television pooler twice this week: on Tuesday and Sunday.
  • Meanwhile, Trump posted a graphic on social media of what he termed “artificial news” outlets, including the three in the legal battle along with NBC and CBS.
• Trump also had another media target this weekend: Fox News, ranting on Truth Social that the network did not sufficiently cover his recent campaign rallies.
  • In a nearly 300-word screed, the president once again complained about Jessica Tarlov, the left-leaning co-host of “The Five.” And he slammed the network for firing Maria Bartiromo.
  • Elsewhere in Truth Social land this weekend, Trump gave out the personal cellphone number of Sen. Tom Cotton, who he complained was holding up a bill to make permanent daylight saving time.
• Kristi Noem raged against The New York Times for recent reporting that Homeland Security gave one of her political donors a major contract just before she left her post, calling the report “factually incorrect,” “libelous,” and calling for a retraction. [Mediaite]
  • The Times said it stood “by the characterization of the political donor and his firm.”
• The families of two journalists killed during a 2022 reporting trip in Ukraine are suing Fox News, alleging it failed to adequately protect its crew in a war zone, David Folkenflik reported. [NPR]
• Israel’s military published a report that claimed 170 people killed in the war in Gaza posed as journalists but were actually militants. [NYT]
• During Saturday’s Power to the People Festival outside D.C., MS NOW hosted a members lounge in connection with the network’s new membership program, where nearly 500 attendees spent the day inside the space.
• The Daily Wire’s latest movie “Pawn Shop” has temporarily suspended production in Montana after protests from locals. [Deadline]
• Taylor Swift made a surprise appearance on “Saturday Night Live” during friend and host Dakota Johnson’s opening monologue. [NBC News]

• The Tom Cruise-starred “Digger” opened as a historic box-office bomb, bringing in just $8 million in its debut weekend after a production budget of some $160 million to $180 million.
  • The Warner Bros. film, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, finished in fifth place domestically, averaging a paltry $2,400 per theater. It did not fare much better globally, where it pulled in around $12 million.
• Another newcomer, the Anne Hathaway- and Dakota Johnson-led “Verity,” won the weekend, scoring an impressive $32.6 million.
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• Sony’s “Resident Evil” took second place in its third weekend in theaters, grabbing around $12.5 million to bring its domestic total near $125 million.
• The Brad Pitt-led survivalist thriller “Heart of the Beast” from Paramount captured third place with around $11 million in its second weekend.
• A24’s “Primetime” remained on solid footing in fourth place, grabbing just over $8 million, also in its sophomore weekend.
• And one historical box office note: “Avengers: Endgame” once again overtook “Avatar” as the highest-grossing film in global box office history, thanks to its recent rerelease, which now puts it at a whopping $2.925 billion worldwide.

[Data via Box Office Mojo]

The latest episode of Power Lines is out.

In this week’s episode: The future of CNN is coming into focus under David Ellison’s control. We break down his decision to stick with Mark Thompson as the network’s chief—for now, at least—and what that means for both Thompson and CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss. We also examine MS NOW’s decision to air Donald Trump’s propagandistic, taxpayer-funded ads and the blowback it has prompted inside the network.

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