Cutting Local Journalists, McClatchy Embraces AI Content

Chris Mills Rodrigo is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

In announcing a deep round of layoffs across its 30-newspaper empire last month, McClatchy executives emphasized that they remain “deeply committed to local journalism.”

“That means investing in journalism that is differentiated, consequential and difficult to replicate; reporting rooted in our communities and strengthened by sources, investigation, verification, context and judgement,” Greg Farmer, McClatchy's vice president of local news, wrote in an internal email.

Staff at the chain's papers have good reason to question that commitment.

At the Idaho Statesman, for example, 10 out of 18 reporters were laid off, in addition to three out of the four editors at the historic paper. The staff of the 162-year-old outlet — older than the state it covers — has been reduced to just nine.

“We were presented with no kind of plan or roadmap for what the future looks like,” Idaho Statesman sports reporter and chair of the Idaho NewsGuild Michael Lycklama told Tech Policy Press.

Across the border in Washington state, McClatchy cut seven positions across the four papers it owns. In Tacoma, that included the reporter responsible for covering city hall and local schools.

“We're still deciphering what the future will hold, but on the ground we're utterly confused as to how a local paper moves forward at all without city hall coverage,” said Kristine Sherred, a food and dining reporter at The News Tribune and chair of the Washington State NewsGuild.

McClatchy’s three other papers in the state also lost critical roles, including the only Spanish-speaking reporter at the Tri-City Herald, which serves southeast Washington.

On the other side of the country in Florida, McClatchy laid off the Miami Herald’s city hall reporter and gutted the entire writing staff at the Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald, its sister publication

“When you're learning that McClatchy management believes, for example, that the city of Miami doesn't need a city hall reporter anymore it's hard to interpret that as anything but McClatchy is pivoting away from journalism,” Sacramento Bee investigative reporter Ariane Lange said.

Taken together, the layoffs that include at least 90 unionized journalists and media workers — before counting editors and any cuts at the 13 nonunionized McClatchy papers — are seismic for local journalism and the communities they serve.

“It’s going to be devastating for a number of communities,” said NewsGuild President Jon Schleuss, especially “because a lot of the people that McClatchy decided to lay off are accountability journalists.”

Layoffs are unfortunately common in journalism, an industry that has been bludgeoned by the collapse of its traditional print advertising model and then floundered in a hyper-concentrated online advertising environment.

But McClatchy, which was purchased by the private equity firm Chatham Asset Management for $312 million in 2020 after its previous owners declared bankruptcy, has not cited financial headwinds to justify these cuts.

A spokesperson for McClatchy did not return requests for comment on this article. The company said inability to pay wages was not behind the layoffs in response to a formal request for information from the Idaho NewsGuild obtained by Tech Policy Press.

Content scaling agents

What makes this particular round of media layoffs unique is what McClatchy is choosing to invest its resources in instead of reporters and editors: artificial intelligence.

Earlier this year, McClatchy introduced a new AI-powered tool it calls a “Content Scaling Agent” (CSA). The CSAs have primarily been used to regurgitate summarized versions of articles written by staff.

The introduction of this new technology, which is likely to have a significant impact on newsrooms, caught reporters by surprise.

At the Sacramento Bee, for example, the newsroom only found out about the new tool because one reporter was asked by an editor to review an AI-produced summary of a piece they had written.

“There is pretty broad consensus that the rollout of this initiative was incredibly ham-fisted,” Lange told Tech Policy Press in May, shortly after the tool was introduced into McClatchy papers. “It appears that there was very little thought, and possibly no thought at all, put into how this might affect the public trust and specifically how this might affect our reputations as journalists.”

Workers across the McClatchy network organized quickly in response to the CSAs, with reporters in unionized newsrooms demanding that their names not be attached to AI-generated articles. This byline strike was honored by management in many newsrooms, who instead put editor’s names on CSA-generated articles along with disclosures about the use of AI in their creation.

In addition to catching reporters by surprise, the abrupt introduction of CSAs seemed to violate their union contracts.

Many NewsGuild unions have contract provisions requiring advance notice, normally of 30 days, before introducing new technologies. Several of them, including the unions at The Sacramento Bee, Idaho Statesman, and the four Washington State McClatchy papers, filed union grievances, formal claims that management violated collective bargaining agreements, when the CSAs were rolled out.

Counting on content

The CSAs were not McClatchy’s first foray into using AI to produce journalism.

In 2021, the Miami Herald announced it was adding the Miami Herald Bot to its real estate coverage team. In 2025 it then hired an “AI-Assisted Reporter” tasked with overseeing AI-produced material. One employee at the Miami Herald, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, told Tech Policy Press in July that that hire is now just reporting on real estate themselves.

Two years ago, McClatchy acquired the company Trend Hunter, which specializes in generating “AI-powered trend reports” on consumer topics based on “billions of data points.” Since the acquisition, articles about dubious health trends attributed to staff at Trend Hunter have appeared all over McClatchy outlet websites. Social media accounts of McClatchy papers have also promoted products on Trend Hunter’s online store, as Straight Arrow News reporter Mark Keierleber has tracked. One technical analysis of The Miami Herald and The Kansas City Star found that AI-generated content made up to 20 percent of the articles on their sites.

And, perhaps most insultingly for McClatchy journalists, less than a week after the layoffs were announced, company leadership sent an internal email celebrating five new hires from August for its AI-focused “Content Innovation Lab.”

One hire will be working on McClatchy’s newly-launched sports-focused vertical called Student Section, a website with the tagline “Powered by TrendHunter.” The website’s headlines include “5 things every Texas college football fan needs to experience at least once,” “Five costumed mascots that capture the spirit of college football Saturdays,” and, for good measure, “Five human mascots who capture the spirit of college football Saturdays.”

The byline attached to that last article, Mike Garbett, is credited with 91 articles on StudentSection between Sept. 24 and 30 of this year.

StudentSection articles now appear across McClatchy newspaper websites with little identification beyond having StudentSection appended next to reporter names.

The chain will soon be launching another vertical called Saltwater South — a “brand focused on life in the coastal South” — according to a job posting shared in a public LinkedIn post on Aug. 25 by new McClatchy content director Lisa Cericola who was also hired in August.

Even if these projects do not publish AI-generated material, the material produced by them is not journalistic in nature. Instead, it seems McClatchy’s executives are all in on producing content, and lots of it.

“It really feels like McClatchy's strategy is getting out of the journalism business and into the content business,” said Lycklama from the Idaho Statesman. “They say tons of pretty words about how important local news is, but look at where they're investing their time and resources: It's AI and it's celebrity gossip magazines,” he added, referring to McClatchy’s 2024 merger with another Chatham Asset Management-owned company, magazine publisher accelerate360, which runs titles such as Us Weekly and In Touch Weekly.

This embrace of AI and maximalist content production at the expense of traditional, human-crafted reporting threatens the future quality of journalism.

At a very basic level, AI-powered tools are prone to mistakes. Not only do the systems lack the capacity to reason or to possess the deep subject matter knowledge that beat reporters do, they also frequently hallucinate facts. One 2025 study in collaboration with 22 public media organizations in 18 countries found that AI assistants misrepresented news content nearly half the time.

The media holding company Gannett (later renamed USA TODAY Co.), for example, had to pause the use of an AI-powered tool to generate high school sports reports in 2023 after the pieces it pushed out to its newspapers were riddled with errors and clunky constructions.

Beyond mistakes, AI tools are also unable to replicate the relationships local journalists have with the communities they cover. Included in the layoffs at The Sacramento Bee was Joe Davidson, who covered local sports for nearly 40 years.

“Maybe you could get an AI product to do the scores easily, but the kinds of stories that Joe does are so much more than that,” Lange said. “He is part of the community. He's going to teenage football players' funerals, and he's following the arc of these teams. The depth of his experience can't be replaced, and people love him. People know Joe as a person; no one's gonna invite an AI chatbot to their son's funeral.”

Local reporters are also key levers of accountability. When Idaho Gov. Brad Little announced a $2 billion investment in public schools in 2024, he cited reporting on dilapidated education infrastructure produced by the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica. Becca Savransky, one of the two reporters on that piece, was among those laid off.

The closure of newspapers across the country, who perform oversight of authorities, significantly correlates with a rise in federal corruption charges against local actors, and one study released this summer found that corruption and wasteful spending tied to decreased accountability journalism costs Americans $1.1 billion in higher borrowing costs for local governments.

“It's really dark that McClatchy would lay off so many accountability reporters,” Schleuss said.

Unions fight back

McClatchy is not the only media company betting on AI. But it may be a canary in the coal mine for how embracing it can hollow out local news.

“Our websites are flooded with AI-generated and tabloid slop that has nothing to do with our local communities, and it drowns out a lot of the work that we're actually doing here in Sacramento and in and in other municipalities across the United States,” said Lange.

Pushing back against AI integrations in newsrooms when they threaten jobs or quality journalism will require workers to be organized.

The NewsGuild has launched a nationwide “News Not Slop” campaign seeking to win contract provisions including transparency requirements, protections against layoffs, and journalist input in the roll out of technologies.

However, although many McClatchy newsrooms had won these kinds of protections earlier, they did not all prove helpful when the CSAs were introduced and layoffs followed.

“The technology is evolving so rapidly and dangerously that even some of the language that had already been secured in some ways sort of felt insufficient,” Sherred from the Washington State NewsGuild said.

Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), said that workers should look at contracts as just one tool in an organizing toolkit. Political education about AI for union members is also important to building worker power to resist bad deployments, she noted.

The unionized workers at McClatchy newspapers are already organizing against the pivot to content production by the company. Not only have they filed grievances over CSAs with individual papers, but the NewsGuild is also contesting the layoffs, including with a letter writing campaign targeting McClatchy.

“We are under no delusions that the media business is doing gangbusters,” said Lyckama, acknowledging the reality of declining profits for news, “but this is a voluntary choice that McClatchy is making to do less local news and more national chasing of clicks.”

The author is a member of the NewsGuild-CWA.