Good Friday wasn’t “good” for all…
The following excerpt was sent out from miaminewtimes.com:
McClatchy, one of the largest newspaper companies in the U.S., revealed layoffs this month at the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald, in the worst round of job cuts to the papers’ news staff since 2019, according to the One Herald Guild.
On Good Friday, April 7, McClatchy revealed it was laying off six employees, including a local research director, two copy editors, a technology and finance reporter, a page layout designer, and a production staffer who works on interactive features for special projects.
“Today, we notified six of our colleagues that their positions have been eliminated effective April 23, 2023,” Monica Richardson, McClatchy’s vice president of news for large markets, wrote in an internal email that Friday evening. “We recognize how difficult this is for these colleagues, and we are working diligently to provide them with the information they need during this transition.”
“We had a motto early on that our journalism is strong when our journalists are strong, and we saw that hedge-fund-owned chains of newspapers typically lead to cutting cost in favor of maximizing profits,” says Joey Flechas, the Miami Herald’s Miami government and public affairs reporter and co-chair of the One Herald Guild union. “We had high hopes that would not manifest here the way it’s manifested in other chains. Our fear is that it is changing, and now perhaps, this is the beginning of that business model.”
Flechas tells New Times that McClatchy informed staff in late February that potential layoffs were coming. He argues that the publisher could have carried out the job cuts sooner rather than informing the six employees on Good Friday.
Richardson said the layoffs had nothing to do with the quality of work. Rather, it was a matter of “finding efficiencies,” a vague explanation that left many staffers scratching their heads, according to the union.
“The positions were selected based solely on our strategy to prioritize local content creation in the newsroom by finding efficiencies in other areas,” Richardson said in the email to staff. “These changes better align our resources with other local newsrooms inside and outside McClatchy.”
Dissolving the copy editor positions could expose the company to liability and potentially undermine the paper’s credibility if mistakes crop up, Flechas said. He argued that the cuts will leave a vacuum in coverage of emerging business trends and Miami’s tech community. And he added that the research director was crucial in the Herald’s coverage of the Champlain Towers South collapse, for which the paper won a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news.
[Editor’s note: The hyperbole of “worst round of job cuts” seems more fitting for the Chicago Tribune’s 2009 layoff of 53 journalists in April 2009, roughly eight times more.]
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