Last week, over 90 McClatchy journalists across the country learned their jobs were being cut in a fresh round of layoffs. Those included the editorial staff of Miami’s Spanish-language newspaper El Nuevo Herald and the last remaining writer of Central California’s Vida en el Valle.

Both Miami-Dade County and California Central Valley are predominantly Latine, with a history of Spanish-speaking migrants — meaning the layoffs cut off one crucial in-language avenue for local news. Pew Research Center surveys have found Latine immigrants are more likely to read news in Spanish than U.S.-born Latine adults, raising questions about what McClatchy’s decision to “align … resources more closely with what our subscribers value” means about the company’s intended audience.

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—James Salanga

The latest round of McClatchy layoffs, announced Sept. 11, eliminated several papers' capacity for Spanish-language reporting in areas where Latine communities make up the majority of the population or are the second most populous demographic group.

NewsGuild-CWA, which represents around 300 workers at McClatchy, said those affected by the cuts include the last remaining reporter for Central California’s longest-running bilingual newspaper, Vida en el Valle, along with the entire writing staff of El Nuevo Herald in Miami and the only Spanish-speaking reporter on the Tri-City Herald. McClatchy is laying off at least 90 people.

“I’m heartbroken,” said the founder of Vida en el Valle, Juan Esparza Loera. Loera was the paper’s editor from its founding in 1990 until he was laid off last year in November, and called the cuts “the death” of the paper.

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🏳️‍🌈 Independent journalist Kevin Ortega-Rojas discovered the U.S.’s largest LGBTQ+ news company, Equalpride, appointed a Trump supporter to its board — but editorial staff at Equalpride publications pressed management to investigate. Katari resigned from the board and was initially able to join via the agreement that Equalpride’s lead investor group could appoint two directors without CEO or management approval. The Trump administration has notably targeted both trans rights and diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. 

📨 Rebuilding the glossy for Black women’s email inboxes: Veteran journalist Geneva S. Thomas sat down with the Columbia Journalism Review to talk about the craft and intention behind her newly-launched publication, The Knowing. “The pieces hark back to a bygone era of Ebony and Essence … that offered a rare space for Black women and buoyed readers aspiring to America’s professional class … in this era of racist and sexist backlash, Thomas thinks it’s time to rebuild that space.”

🗃️ A new study from the Pew Research Center found that the majority of U.S. adults see financial and political factors shaping news production and publication, and many participants in focus groups expressed concern about that influence. That makes sense, considering six publishers own the majority of newspapers in the U.S. and some, like Carpenter Media Group, have caved to political pressure to amend articles. 

🔎 Science communication may be thriving thanks to the internet, but the collapse of popular science print magazines in recent years means the same isn’t necessarily true of science journalism. Historically, write professors and science writers Chris Mooney and Bruce Lewenstein, the worry about science communication has been a result of a moral panic, but it also didn’t come from nowhere: The entire structure of journalism is currently changing — media conglomerates are just one reason behind the layoffs and closures across science verticals and magazines. 

🤖 WE News in Canada used AI to generate Indigenous correspondents, buttressing an editorial model reliant on using generative AI to repackage other existing reporting. Indigenous Media Association of Canada president Kerry Benjoe had this to say about the choice: “The space [Indigenous journalists] fought so hard to get, the stories they fought so hard to tell are just completely taken away, they're taken out of it.”

💻 Truthout’s editorial team published a call to everyone invested in journalism’s future to resist the perception of generative AI as inevitable, calling the rise of LLM-collated search results a threat to democracy: “Can we trust Google’s AI search to accurately tell us about privacy controversies concerning Gmail, or about safety ratings for Google-owned Waymo self-driving cars? … We all have a stake in this struggle. Don’t let AI take over our search results or our lives without a fight.”

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This issue is by Marlee Baldridge and James Salanga. Thanks for reading. We’ll have more for you next week.

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