6 OctOber 8-14, 2026 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | OctOber 8-14, 2026 miaminewtimes.com MIAMI NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | FILM | ART | STAGE | NIGHT+DAY | METRO | RIPTIDE | LETTERS | CONTENTS | work that exposed his abuse of young women, the justice system that protected him and the powerful people around him. One of journalism’s most prestigious institutions effectively said, “This is what journalism is for.” Four months later, the company that owns Brown’s newspaper eliminated 32 positions. Before that, Herald journalists had been fighting another battle with their employer, this one over artificial intelligence. The Herald has been experimenting with automation for years. In October 2021, the Miami Herald Bot began pumping out stories from structured data, initially covering real estate. It produced hundreds of articles be- fore its byline disappeared in November 2023. Nine months later, it resurfaced to cover Hurricane Debby, and automated hur- ricane updates continued through the 2024 storm season. Then, in July 2025, McClatchy advertised a new job at the paper: “Broward AI-Assisted Reporter.” The human journalist filling the role would use AI to generate templated sto- ries from databases, listings and feeds; review and fact-check machine-generated copy; and help train colleagues to use generative AI in their workflows. At least in theory, the bargain is compel- ling: Let machines handle repetitive work so journalists have more time for reporting. McClatchy is hardly alone in trying this approach. A 2025 Knight Foundation survey cited by the Associated Press found that 63% of news- rooms were using AI or automation to evalu- ate audience engagement and optimize publishing decisions. News organizations in- creasingly track repeat readership, scroll depth and topic interest to determine how stories are pitched, packaged and promoted. But even news organizations embracing those tools acknowledge an obvious limitation. In Muck Rack’s 2026 State of Journalism survey, 82% of journalists said they had used at least one AI tool in their work the previous year, up from 77% in 2025. At the same time, concern about the unchecked use of AI in journalism jumped from 18% to 26%, tying public trust as one of the profession’s top con- cerns. Lack of funding ranked even higher: 32% of journalists named it among the issues worrying them most, while 20% cited under- staffing and time pressure. Another 20% pointed to the decline of local news. The result is an industry increasingly em- bracing the same technology many of its workers fear could further destabilize it. “There are stories we know won’t perform — but we still have to do them,” Al Jazeera’s Juan Carlos Van Meek said during an AP we- binar. “That’s where the editorial judgment comes in.” Nik Usher, a professor of communication studies at the University of San Diego who studies the changing economics and geography of journalism, doesn’t dismiss AI as inherently hostile to journalism. Used correctly, they ar- gue, it could actually give shrinking newsrooms something they desperately need: time. Artificial intelligence can transcribe inter- views, process structured data, help journal- ists analyze documents, automate routine information, and perform repetitive tasks that once consumed reporting hours. In that sense, Usher sees AI as a tool that can expand what an individual reporter can do. But efficiency is not the same thing as re- porting. “Anything that involves the most essential parts about being a journalist — the human relationships, the anomalies and human in- teraction, being physically present and being a voice for the community, building interper- sonal relationships — those are all things that AI can’t replace,” Usher says. An algorithm might help a reporter ana- lyze thousands of pages of public records. It can’t cultivate a source who quietly explains why those records matter. “If there’s this idea that AI — don’t worry about journalism, we’ve got AI — I’m sorry,” Usher says. “I don’t see a chatbot being par- ticularly convincing when it comes to talking to the police chief about why they’re using surveillance cameras on every corner.” That distinction hasn’t stopped news com- panies from testing just how much of the journalistic process AI can handle. Mc- Clatchy’s AI experiments, for example, have evolved beyond the Herald Bot. Its “content scaling agent,” powered by Anthropic’s Claude, can turn an existing arti- cle into summaries, versions for different au- diences, explainers, and video scripts. An executive pitching the system internally told journalists: “We need more stories and we need more inventory.” Unions representing journalists at the Herald, Sacramento Bee and Kansas City Star subsequently filed grievances alleging McClatchy had violated contract provisions requiring advance notice of major technological changes. Then came the September layoffs. There is no evidence that AI directly re- placed the journalists who lost their jobs. In fact, a person close to McClatchy’s executive decision-making told the New York Times that the cuts were unrelated to AI and instead reflected business performance. Still, the developments are unfolding si- multaneously: McClatchy is employing fewer journalists while developing technology that can generate more content from the report- ing its remaining staff produces. An AI system can turn an investigation into five different articles. It can transform a database into hundreds of templated stories. It can summarize a government document in seconds. But it cannot generate reporting that was never done. Someone still has to attend the meetings, request the records, cultivate the sources and notice that the numbers don’t add up. Victor Pickard, a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Com- munication, described the dynamic in The Progressive Magazine just six days before Mc- Clatchy’s layoffs: “Too often, costly services like high-quality journalism are dismantled while content that’s cheaply produced and easily replicated...gets amplified.” This raises an uncomfortable possibility: Maybe what is ending isn’t journalism. Maybe it’s the commercial system that paid for it. Artificial intelligence arrived late to jour- nalism’s existential crisis. For most of the 20th century, local newspapers had an ex- traordinarily lucrative business model. They sold journalism, but they also sold classified ads, job listings, car advertisements, and full- page spreads from local retailers. That advertising subsidized reporting whose civic value could far exceed its com- mercial value. A newspaper could afford to send someone to City Hall every day because every City Hall story didn’t have to pay for it- self. Then the internet dismantled that model piece by piece. The resulting contraction is difficult to overstate. Since 2005, the newspaper indus- try has lost more than three-quarters of its jobs. Only 91,550 people remained employed across all newspaper occupations in 2024, down by more than 270,000 over two de- cades. Nearly 3,500 local newspapers have vanished — almost 40% of the country’s total. Print circulation fell from roughly 120 mil- lion in 2005 to 38 million in 2025. Digital au- diences are following suit: Medill examined web traffic at 100 of the country’s largest newspapers and found their average monthly pageviews fell more than 45% over four years. The money disappeared too. Newspaper advertising revenue plunged from $37.8 bil- lion in 2008 to $14.3 billion a decade later, ac- cording to Pew Research Center. The consequences now extend beyond newspaper balance sheets. Medill counts 212 U.S. counties with no local news source and another 1,525 with only one. Together, nearly 50 million Americans live with limited or no access to local news. Those pressures are showing up in how journalists describe their own careers. Muck Rack’s 2026 survey found that 38% called their work precarious and 47% described it as exhausting. Nearly two-thirds said their re- sponsibilities had expanded beyond their core role during the previous year, while one respondent distilled the industry’s long-run- ning mandate into six words: “Hire more people instead of demanding we do more with less.” That national story can be traced almost line by line through one Miami newsroom. The Miami Herald lived through virtually ev- ery stage of that transformation. Around 1990, more than 500 people worked in its news- room. By 2001, the figure had fallen to 375. When McClatchy acquired media com- pany Knight Ridder in 2006, Herald veterans later estimated the newsroom employed roughly 400 journalists. McClatchy paid $4.5 billion in cash and stock for the company and assumed another $2 billion in debt, just as the economics of the newspaper industry began their historic collapse. Then the floor fell out. The old Miami Herald building, an iconic waterfront landmark at One Herald Plaza in downtown Miami, opened in 1963 and was fully demolished by March 2015. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images Paper Cuts from p5