BoSacks Speaks Out: McClatchy and the Corporate Savaging of Local Journalism

There is cost-cutting. There is restructuring. And then there is what I call corporate savaging: dismembering a necessary institution for short-term financial benefit without sufficient regard for what the destruction does to the communities it serves.

That is how I view McClatchy’s latest newsroom cuts.

As Richard J. Tofel reports in “McClatchy, Cutting Newsrooms, Says the Quiet Part Out Loud,” more than 90 unionized journalists and media workers were eliminated across 17 McClatchy publications. That represents approximately 30 percent of the company’s unionized workforce.

The casualties include local government reporters, investigative journalists, education reporters, data reporters, environmental reporters and the entire sports staff of The Sacramento Bee. At The Miami Herald, 32 positions were lost or frozen, including the writing staff of El Nuevo Herald.

These are not decorative positions. These are the people who attend city council meetings, examine public records, investigate corruption, cover schools, follow tax dollars and explain what local institutions are doing in the public’s name.

When they disappear, something far more important than a line on a corporate spreadsheet disappears with them.

I have been a businessman and publisher for my entire adult life. I understand the need for profit. Profit is not a dirty word. It is the oxygen that keeps an organization operating, employees paid and journalism alive. A publication that cannot support itself will eventually cease to exist, regardless of its noble intentions.

But profit and corporate extraction are not the same thing.

A responsible publisher must constantly balance financial reality with the obligation to serve readers. That balance is difficult, particularly in today’s punishing newspaper economy. Advertising has migrated elsewhere, circulation has declined, production and distribution costs have risen, and readers have developed more alternatives than they could possibly consume.

None of that is imaginary. None of it can be dismissed with sentimental speeches about the good old days.

But McClatchy’s response appears to be a strategy of managed decline: cut the journalism, watch readership fall, blame insufficient subscriber interest and then use the declining readership to justify the next round of cuts.

That is not a turnaround plan. It is an extraction cycle.

McClatchy management says it can no longer invest “where subscriber interest does not support the investment.” That statement manages to shift responsibility from the corporation to the customer. The implication is that readers failed to appreciate the journalism, so management had no choice but to reduce it further.

But what exactly were readers being asked to support?

Over the past five years, McClatchy says it maintained local newsroom spending largely at existing levels. With inflation, however, flat spending is a substantial reduction in real buying power. During that period, the company also eliminated its acclaimed Washington bureau and its breaking-news desk. According to Tofel, consumer revenue then fell 41 percent.

So the company weakened the product, lost customers and concluded that the solution was to weaken the product again.

There is an old business expression about eating your seed corn. McClatchy seems intent on publishing a case study.

The company says it wants to concentrate on journalism with the “greatest impact” and on subjects subscribers value most. Yet the cuts sweep across investigative reporting, city government, education, the environment, data journalism and sports.

That is not focus. It is amputation without a discernible editorial philosophy.

A newspaper stripped of the reporters who cover its community is not becoming more efficient. It is becoming less of a newspaper.

And no, artificial intelligence will not repair the damage. AI can summarize information, repackage stories and increase certain kinds of productivity. It cannot replace the reporter who develops sources over many years, recognizes when an official is being evasive, discovers the suspicious contract buried in a public document or shows up at a school board meeting when everyone else has gone home.

AI can rearrange the journalism that exists. It cannot report the story that nobody has yet uncovered.

The deeper issue is ownership and purpose. McClatchy’s controlling interest does not appear to be the communities its newspapers serve. Its primary interest appears to be the corporate bottom line. Perhaps that is unsurprising for a company controlled by an investment fund, but it is still destructive.

It is also not inevitable.

The experience of the Minneapolis Star Tribune offers a useful counterexample. After the newspaper emerged from bankruptcy, its investment-fund owners hired experienced publishing leadership, retained a substantial newsroom, developed new revenue streams, reduced debt and stabilized the business. They eventually sold the newspaper to a local owner committed to both its financial health and its civic purpose.

That history matters because it demonstrates that investment ownership does not automatically require the destruction of journalism.

The problem is not that hedge funds are incapable of responsible stewardship. The problem is that their financial incentives rarely reward it.

Corporate savaging is a choice, not an unavoidable law of newspaper economics.

I would like to believe that morality matters in corporate decision-making. Sadly, it is not a legal requirement, and it apparently does not always survive the quarterly budget review.

Prudence, however, should matter even to those unmoved by moral obligation. With imagination, discipline and patience, it should be possible to serve both agendas: build a sustainable business while preserving enough journalistic strength to remain valuable to the community.

Cutting may sometimes be necessary. Cutting away the very reason readers subscribe is corporate self-destruction disguised as financial management.

Local journalism is not simply another content category. It is part of a community’s civic infrastructure. When fewer reporters are watching local government, schools, courts, police departments and public spending, the damage is not confined to a newsroom. Citizens know less. Officials receive less scrutiny. Corruption becomes easier. Rumor, misinformation and partisan propaganda fill the empty space.

The public ultimately pays the bill for the savings corporations claim to have achieved.

McClatchy may improve its immediate financial results by eliminating reporters. But it is also liquidating trust, institutional knowledge and community value that took generations to build.

That is not merely downsizing.

That is corporate savaging for profit.