McClatchy layoffs cause ‘end of an era’ for some Spanish-language papers

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. 

McClatchy last made a similar cut of this magnitude during restructuring in 2018, when it eliminated 140 jobs, and has faced pushback from reporters this year as it seeks to attribute AI-generated work to reporter bylines. 

An internal memo from McClatchy said the layoffs were intended to “align … resources more closely with what our subscribers value.” A spokesperson from McClatchy did not respond to requests for comment from The Objective. 

“We can’t tell if this is metrics-based, if this is pay-based … did they just throw a dart at a person?” said Cameron Probert, treasurer for the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild. The union represents four papers, including the Tri-City Herald. “None of us think that this is a good idea.” 

Translators are among those whose jobs are most vulnerable to job loss from generative AI, despite prior instances of AI hallucinations in translations, and research on the Latine news landscape has found Spanish-speaking immigrants are the predominant audience for news in Spanish — not younger, U.S.-born Latine communities. Migrant Latine communities are already particularly vulnerable under the Trump administration, which deported a record number of people this July.

Cuts impact areas with predominantly Latine communities 

Loera said Vida en el Valle “put the spotlight on Latino success stories”, remembering the paper’s work packaging everything from horoscopes, to U.S. naturalization ceremonies and high school graduations, to Latine pop culture, to the growth of Latine population in the San Joaquin Valley. 

“We were able to cover the Latino community in ways that had never been covered before, that I had not seen in my years as a newspaper reporter and editor,” Loera said. “I was able to hire fantastic individuals, reporters, and photographers that helped make the newspaper grow.”

The National Association of Hispanic Publications has awarded Vida en el Valle the U.S.’s best bilingual paper more than any other publication. 

Loera left his position at the McClatchy-owned Modesto Bee to found Vida en el Valle as part of the Fresno Bee in August 1990. He said Vida en el Valle was once the largest bilingual publication in the country based on circulation and had editions across five McClatchy papers in California’s Central Valley, where Latine communities are the majority of the population.

Similarly, the El Nuevo Herald, published by the Miami Herald as a Spanish-language newspaper covering Miami-Dade County and south Florida, had its entire writing staff laid off in the McClatchy cuts. The city of Miami, Florida’s second-largest, is also 70% Latine. 

The El Nuevo Herald began as a Spanish-language insert in the Miami Herald in 1975, and later became a full-fledged publication in 1987.

The Miami Herald’s deputy investigations editor Carol Marbin Miller wrote that across both papers, over 30 positions were wrote off or laid off. 

“We are … slicing out the vital organs, such as coverage of the cities of Miami and Miami Beach. How can you cover Miami without a Miami reporter?” Miller wrote. “Miami is on the precipice of becoming a news desert — whether the Herald survives these cuts or not.” 

Meanwhile, in Washington state, the highest population of Latine people is across Yakima, Grant, Franklin, and Adams counties — all part of the coverage area of the Tri-City Herald, which lost its only Spanish-speaking reporter in the McClatchy cuts.

Probert has been working for the Tri-City Herald for over a decade. He said the Herald’s Latino communities reporter job came out of a fellowship that became a permanent position, and McClatchy’s decision to eliminate the position “cuts off somebody who has the ability to reach into those communities and talk to people.” 

“There is only so far I can go as an English speaker into the community,” Probert said. “My fundamental concern with what they did here is that … when you don’t have access to a narrative, people make up that narrative for you.” 

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Related: Q&A: Lucy Flores on the Latino Media Consortium

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Reducing local Spanish-language news hurts immigrant access to information

News media by and for Latine communities has long been a part of the U.S. media landscape, given the legacy of Spanish colonization in the U.S. But circulation for Spanish-language weekly and biweekly newspapers has been declining, according to the Pew Research Center’s most recent fact sheet about Hispanic media from 2023. 

And a majority — 54% — of U.S. Latine adults surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2023 said that they solely consume news in English. 

El Tímpano, which operates a text messaging news service in both Spanish and Mam for Latine and Mayan immigrants, says their in-language hotline allows for “two-way communication” allowing for recipients to ask questions and share thoughts in their primary language. The organization developed its approach through a series of Spanish-language surveys and focus groups prior to launching. Immigrants are more likely to say they consume news in Spanish, a pattern which also shaped the creation of both the El Nuevo Herald and Vida en el Valle. 

Loera remembered that even before he showed up in Fresno in August 1990 to help found the publication, the Fresno Bee had held focus groups, surveys, and sit-down interviews with Latine communities who “overwhelmingly wanted something bilingual.” 

“Through the years, we discovered that people were switching their preference from Spanish to English,” he said. “We maintained the bilingual approach, but we focused on the English[-language coverage] and then the Spanish.” 

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Related: What it takes to build a sustainable news organization in Spanish in the U.S.

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Regional, statewide, and national coverage — like that from Fresno-based Radio Bilingüe — has been focused on “consistent and reliable information” about how the Trump administration is affecting policy areas across immigration to public health, but Loera wishes for more Spanish-language reporting at the city and county level. 

He recalled a conversation with a communications person from the Mexican consulate in Fresno highlighting the continued importance of Spanish-language media. 

“She was lamenting the fact that she really doesn’t have many media outlets to disseminate information to the Latino community, especially to Mexican nationals,” he said. 

By far, Latine adults are more likely than others in the U.S. to say they worry they or someone close to them might be deported, given increased immigration raids during the second Trump administration. 

There are two local Spanish-language community digital and print publications, Noticiero Semenal and Pique Fresno, serving Fresno today. 

But Loera remembers that in 2000, “there were maybe six or seven papers that cater to the Latino community, either in English or in Spanish or in both languages, in our area.” 

What’s next? 

Staffers have begun GoFundMes to support laid-off workers across McClatchy papers, and Probert with the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild says the union is currently exploring “everything we can” to double-check if the publisher followed existing union contracts. 

“Depending on what we find, we might be able to push back,” he said. 

Meanwhile, McClatchy has continued to embrace the use of generative AI to produce stories from reporters’ prior written content, after cutting its entire national news team last November and continuing to hire for jobs titled “AI-assisted reporter.”

Newsroom unions representing McClatchy journalists continue to push for guardrails around the use of generative AI, but are unable to bargain as a united coalition: The union representing the two Heralds must bargain separately from the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, for example. 

While those negotiations continue, Loera said that he isn’t surprised by the McClatchy layoffs at fellow Spanish-language publication El Nuevo Herald. Instead, he’s sad, mad, and angry that great journalists lost their jobs. 

Ultimately, he said, he has come to terms with the end of Vida en el Valle. But he said if anyone wants to resurrect the publication, he would help them. 

“I was going through my storage … [looking at] magazines that no longer exist, magazines that were directed at the Latino community, [from] Hispanic business to entertainment,” he said. “Those don’t exist anymore, and it’s a shame, because I don’t think people have lost any interest in that.”

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James Salanga is the co-director of The Objective.

This story was edited and copy edited by Marlee Baldridge.