5 OctOber 8-14, 2026 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com NEW TIMES | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | OctOber 8-14, 2026 miaminewtimes.com MIAMI NEW TIMES | CONTENTS | LETTERS | RIPTIDE | METRO | NIGHT+DAY | STAGE | ART | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | F or years, Miami Herald reporter Tess Riski covered the unglamorous machinery of local democracy: com- mission meetings, elections, devel- opment deals, public land, and the endless political combat of a city where real estate and government are rarely far apart. Her recent sto- ries examined a proposed mooring field off Virginia Key, potentially transformative zoning changes in Little Ha- vana and the city’s controversial departure from its waterfront City Hall. Then, on September 10, her job disappeared. By that afternoon, social media had be- come a grim roll call of journalists announc- ing that the beats and communities they covered were losing them. Allison Beck, who covered Broward County for the Herald, briefly returned to X to write that “my entire team was eliminated” in the layoffs. “More words later,” they added, “but it’s been an adventure and I’m sending all the love to my colleagues today.” Hundreds of miles away, reporters at other McClatchy papers were making similar an- nouncements. Alex Acquisto, an award-win- ning health and politics reporter and union representative at the Lexington Herald- Leader, called the losses bigger than the peo- ple laid off. “Journalism at its best holds power to account, sheds light on corruption, and equips us with necessary information to make the most informed decisions in our communities,” she said. Gutting one of Ken- tucky’s oldest and largest newsrooms, she warned, “fully threatens our ability to do that and should be concerning to everyone.” Others focused on how abruptly years of work had ended. Across McClatchy’s papers, reporters posted farewells to the communi- ties and beats they had covered, thanked col- leagues and sources, and tried to make sense of what their departures meant for the places left behind. One Herald-Leader City Hall reporter wrote simply: “All I’ve wanted to do since moving to Lexington is serve the city well.” In the Pacific Northwest, the reaction was similarly bleak. Journalists described col- leagues calling one another in tears as Mc- Clatchy cut investigative reporters, city reporters and other local-news positions across Idaho and Washington. “Journalism is so needed,” one former colleague wrote. “Idaho & Washington will be worse off.” The posts began to read less like isolated layoff announcements than a map of local re- porting disappearing in real time. By day’s end, more than 90 unionized jour- nalists and media workers across 17 McClatchy publications had lost their jobs. At the Herald alone, McClatchy eliminated 32 positions — 28 employees and four vacant jobs, according to reporting by WLRN. Riski was among those laid off. So were the paper’s remaining Broward reporters, its audience team and sole video pro- ducer. At its Spanish-language sister publica- tion, El Nuevo Herald, the paper eliminated its entire writing staff. An open position covering Miami Beach also won’t be filled. Carol Marbin Miller, the Herald’s long- time deputy investigations editor, was not among those initially laid off. Days later, she and veteran reporter Andres Viglucci ac- cepted voluntary buyouts proposed by the union in an effort to save other newsroom jobs. Miller, who joined the Herald in 2000, says the terms of her buyout restrict what she can say about McClatchy, so she is careful to discuss the consequences of newsroom re- ductions more broadly. Still, the math is difficult to ignore. “At any newspaper in America, when you subtract 30% of the staff, you’re going to see changes in how the news is covered,” Miller says. “It’s inevitable.” Miller has lived through dozens of layoffs and buyouts during more than four decades in newspapers. Each round, she says, takes a toll on both those who leave and those who remain. “Newspapers are families,” she says. “You experience survivor’s guilt. When your friends and colleagues walk out the door, you are saddened by that, and you also have real worry about your own future.” To the journalists losing their jobs, the cuts looked like another stage in local news’ collapse. McClatchy framed them instead as an effort to preserve what remained. In a let- ter sent to employees that day, the company argued that preserving local journalism re- quired changing where it spent its money. “The local news marketplace has changed dramatically,” the letter began. “Audiences have more choices than ever, distribution has frag- mented, and content has become abundant.” For five years, McClatchy said, it had maintained its investment in local reporters. Then it measured the results. “Consumer rev- enue declined 41% while local news expenses remained largely flat,” the company wrote. “The results are clear and require us to make a different choice.” That choice, McClatchy said, means no longer “investing where subscriber interest does not support the investment.” Instead, the company plans to focus on journalism that is “differentiated, consequential and difficult to replicate” — reporting built on sources, inves- tigation, verification, context and judgment. In other words, McClatchy’s vision for the future sounds remarkably like the traditional argument for employing local reporters in the first place. The company said subscriber be- havior and data will increasingly help deter- mine where those journalists are deployed. “We will move forward with focus,” the letter said, “investing in the journalism our sub- scribers value and that our communities need.” The problem is that those two things aren’t always the same. A subscriber might never click a story about an obscure zoning change. An investi- gation might attract little attention until the day it exposes something extraordinary. And some of the journalism a community most needs is journalism its readers don’t yet know they need. For decades, newspapers could subsidize that work with money generated elsewhere in the business. That economic bargain has collapsed. Now McClatchy is explicitly saying something much of the newspaper industry has increasingly practiced: Journalism has to demonstrate that readers value it. But how do you measure the value of hav- ing someone watching? The answer becomes considerably less abstract when that person is gone. City commissions will keep meeting. Devel- opment deals will move forward. Public money will be spent. Politicians will make decisions. What has changed is how many journalists are being paid to scrutinize it all. That makes the timing of the Herald cuts particularly striking. Only four months earlier, the Pulitzer Prize Board awarded Herald investigative re- porter Julie K. Brown a special citation for her reporting on Jeffrey Epstein; McClatchy acquired media company Knight Ridder in 2006. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images >> p6 The Miami Herald is shrinking. Journalism is, too. BY NATASHA YEE The Miami Herald is shrinking. “At any newspaper in America, when you subtract 30% of the staff, you’re going to see changes in how the news is covered.” Adobe Stock