Miami Herald loses 32 positions as El Nuevo Herald writing staff is eliminated

McClatchy eliminated 32 positions at The Miami Herald on Sept. 10, cutting 28 employees and freezing or eliminating four vacant roles. The reductions removed the paper’s remaining Broward County reporters, its audience team and sole video producer, while El Nuevo Herald lost its entire writing staff. The cuts also left the Herald without a City Hall reporter and its only female photographer. Across McClatchy, more than 90 unionized journalists and media workers lost jobs at 17 publications, about 30% of the company’s NewsGuild-represented workforce, according to the union. Accounts differed on the Miami breakdown. WLRN and Miami New Times reported 28 lost jobs and four frozen positions, while Poynter reported 20 layoffs and 10 eliminated vacancies. Poynter also said the newsroom had fewer than 50 people after the reductions, compared with roughly 300 when reporter Carol Marbin Miller joined in 2000. McClatchy described the cuts as a restructuring to align newsroom resources with changing subscriber interests and audience engagement. Greg Farmer, the company’s executive vice president, said its five-year investment in local-news reporters had produced results requiring “a different choice.” In an employee letter, the company said consumer revenue had fallen 41% while local-news expenses had stayed largely flat, and said it would focus on journalism that was “differentiated, consequential and difficult to replicate.” The two Miami journalists Carol Marbin Miller and Andres Viglucci later accepted voluntary buyouts proposed by the union to try to preserve other newsroom jobs. Four months before the layoffs, the Pulitzer Prize Board had awarded Herald investigative reporter Julie K. Brown a special citation for her reporting on Jeffrey Epstein. The reductions followed years of newsroom contraction. The Herald employed more than 500 people around 1990, about 375 in 2001 and roughly 400 journalists when McClatchy acquired Knight Ridder in 2006. Successive layoffs and buyouts had reduced the journalism staff to 275 by September 2008, and Mary Ellen Klas estimated that about 130 journalists remained in 2020. McClatchy filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy that year and was bought by Chatham Asset Management for about $312 million. Automation has been a separate point of tension. The Miami Herald Bot began producing structured-data real-estate stories in October 2021, publishing hundreds of articles before its byline disappeared in November 2023 and returned nine months later for Hurricane Debby coverage. McClatchy advertised for a “Broward AI-Assisted Reporter” in July 2025, a role involving AI-generated templated stories, fact-checking and training colleagues in generative-AI workflows. McClatchy has also introduced a “Content Scaling Agent” that creates summaries and alternate versions of staff-written articles. Unionized reporters at several of its newsrooms withheld their names from AI-generated articles, and some unions filed grievances alleging that the rollout breached contractual advance-notice requirements. But a person familiar with executive decision-making told The New York Times that the September layoffs reflected business performance rather than AI. Northwestern University’s 2025 State of Local News report found that nearly 40% of U.S. local newspapers had vanished, with 212 counties having no local news source and 1,525 relying on only one. Newspaper employment fell 7% in the year covered by the report, and nearly 50 million Americans lived in counties with limited or no access to local news.