Some of the nation’s largest local newspapers have been gutted as industry giant McClatchy Media pivots toward artificial intelligence-generated articles about sober sauna raves, nugget ice and poop.
Mass layoffs were announced Thursday across McClatchy-owned newspapers, including The Kansas City Star, the Idaho Statesman and The Charlotte Observer. Many of the outlets suffered steep cuts, including the Miami Herald, where the editorial staff was slashed by a third.
More than 90 journalists across 17 publications were laid off, according to the NewsGuild, accounting for some 40% of the company’s unionized workers.
The cuts include the city hall reporter in Miami and every reporter at the Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald. In Charlotte, an investigative reporter published an exposé on a log-cabin company accused of defrauding homebuyers just hours before getting cut from the masthead.
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While McClatchy journalists blasted the layoffs as a devastating loss for local news from coast to coast, company executives framed them as necessary to compete against social media influencers — and survive industrywide woes.
In what he labeled a “CONFIDENTIAL local news announcement” — shared with Straight Arrow — Greg Farmer, McClatchy’s executive vice president for local news, said the “local news marketplace has changed dramatically” and McClatchy had made a deliberate choice in the last five years to “maintain our investment in local news reporters.”
But ultimately, the letter continued, revenue from subscribers has declined 41% and the layoffs were part of a bid to realign “with what our customers value.”
“We are making these changes because the status quo no longer works,” Farmer wrote in the letter to staff. “We cannot continue investing where subscriber interest does not support the investment. We need to listen to our subscribers, make choices and focus resources to create the greatest value.”
The McClatchy value proposition? AI-generated articles such as recent offerings that explain how nugget ice “has become the craze worth understanding,” how saunas have “reshaped social wellness” and “what your poop color, shape and frequency say about your gut health.”
Or, as one Kansas City Star reporter told Straight Arrow, it’s “city reporters out, s—ty reporters in.”
“They’re trying to kind of go towards these buzzy-type topics instead of local journalism that holds people to account,” said the reporter, who was not laid off and spoke on the condition of anonymity due to retaliation concerns.
‘Slicing out the vital organs’
Carol Marbin Miller, the Miami Herald’s deputy investigations editor, wrote on X about the decline of a legacy publication that’s served the community for 122 years. The city, she said, is “on the precipice of becoming a news desert.”
“We long ago cut past the skin and the bone and the muscle and the tendons and the ligaments,” Marbin Miller wrote. “We are now slicing out the vital organs, such as coverage of the cities of Miami and Miami Beach. How can you cover Miami without a Miami reporter?”
The full extent of the job cuts is unclear, though at some outlets — including the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky, which has won three Pulitzer Prizes over the past four decades — newsrooms were slashed by more than half.
McClatchy, which operates 29 daily newspapers across 14 states, didn’t respond to emails from Straight Arrow seeking comment.
The latest round of layoffs, the Kansas City reporter said, come in addition to a wave of resignations in roles that have since gone unfilled.
“We’re hemorrhaging people,” the reporter said. In their place, McClatchy is hiring for a “college sports personality/influencer,” and bringing on “content strategists” who are paid as much as $90,000 a year to produce AI-generated articles.
“Those jobs are essentially AI content farm jobs,” the reporter said. “They want people’s names attached to it because that helps their credibility in search engines.”
McClatchy’s big AI pivot
The layoffs across McClatchy outlets this week represent the latest clash between management and rank-and-file reporters.
Earlier this year, journalists found themselves in feuds with their bosses over an AI-powered tool called the “content scaling agent.” The tool uses a chatbot to repackage human-written news articles at varying lengths for different audiences — complete with reporters’ bylines.
During a contentious, off-the-record virtual town hall in May, company executives said their business was in freefall — and positioned AI as its savior. Executives pleaded with skeptical journalists to get on board, and issued what appeared to be a threat: Embrace AI or face consequences.
“Ask yourself, would you rather our business be ruined than change?” Farmer asked during the webinar, a recording of which was shared exclusively with Straight Arrow.
AI-generated articles have flooded the internet, with one recent report finding they now account for more than half of articles on the web. Legacy publications have scrambled to adapt, with varying degrees of optimism about a future dominated by chatbots. At McClatchy, where reporters’ use of AI is now factored into performance reviews, executives made clear they plan to go all in.
“We have a company-wide effort to agentify the entire enterprise,” McClatchy CEO Tony Hunter said during the town hall.
The result has been a flood of AI-generated content at newspapers owned by McClatchy which, in 2024, acquired a suite of lifestyle magazines like Soap Opera Digest and a company that uses AI “to glean insights into consumer trends.”
Readers have noticed. In a post on Thursday, an X user noted that McClatchy papers from Miami to Sacramento had published an article about why the actress Scarlett Johansson “changed her magnesium supplement routine after a spray left her feet feeling dry.”
While McClatchy embraces lifestyle coverage, rank-and-file workers accuse the company of abandoning the local communities they serve.
The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, the union representing workers at papers in Washington and Idaho, blasted the move as being driven by “short-term profits for a hedge fund,” at the expense of local news consumers. Communities throughout the Northwest, the union wrote Thursday on X, will be left without coverage that holds public officials accountable. Lost are reporters who rush to the scenes of wildfires, served as government watchdogs and “showed up at every high school game.”
“One of these papers will no longer have a dedicated reporter covering city hall,” the guild wrote. “Another will no longer have anyone dedicated to covering the state capitol.”
Readers remain skeptical of AI-written articles
Many news organizations prohibit the publication of AI-generated articles. Others, such as The Associated Press, use AI to produce routine content, such as corporate earnings reports and sports box scores. Bloomberg and The Washington Post use it to create summaries that accompany news stories.
Straight Arrow uses AI to help produce features such as Media Miss and Media Landscape, which analyze coverage from multiple news outlets. However, editors review all AI content, and AI is never used to write news articles.
Readers, meanwhile, have signaled skepticism of news written by robots. In a 2024 Pew Research Center report, half of respondents said they believe AI will have a negative impact on news over the next two decades. Among respondents, 59% said AI will lead to fewer journalism jobs, and 41% believed AI would do a worse job writing articles than reporters. Two-thirds of respondents said they’re concerned that AI would provide them with inaccurate information.
In fact, few people — just 9% of adult respondents — said they get news at least sometimes from AI chatbots, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey. Three-fourths of respondents said they never rely on chatbots for news. Of those who do rely on tools like ChatGPT for news, half said they sometimes come across information they believe is inaccurate.
But that hasn’t stopped McClatchy executives from viewing AI as the future of news.
Some McClatchy newsletters are now automated, the Kansas City reporter said, as are social media posts. The company recently offered a week-long training program devoted to newsroom AI efforts, the reporter said, but “no newsroom training on, like, ‘here’s how to write better, here’s how to request records.’”
At the same time, the reporter said, the human journalists who remain face steep pressures to crank out low-quality content at breakneck speed.
“We’re being pressured to write as many stories as possible, and when you’re writing two or more stories a day, you can’t get that information that people need,” the reporter said. “We’re being encouraged to do parachute reporting in our own communities.”
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