The next school board meeting will still happen. The next government contract will still be signed. The next family with a story nobody wants to hear will still need someone to listen.
What is becoming less certain is whether a reporter will be there.
McClatchy laid off more than 90 unionized journalists and media workers across 17 publications on September 10, according to a September 11 tally from The NewsGuild-CWA. The union said the cuts represented about 30% of the McClatchy workforce it represents. That figure includes workers beyond reporters and does not count the company’s entire staff.
The reductions reached the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where the union identified departing journalists whose work included suburban development, school boards, government contracts, service journalism and sports.
Across the chain, the losses are measured in entire areas of coverage. The union reported that The Charlotte Observer lost its only two investigative reporters; the Idaho Statesman lost 10 of its 18 journalists; and the cuts eliminated El Nuevo Herald’s entire writing staff.
“We are waist-deep in the quicksand and we are still sinking,” Carol Marbin Miller, the Miami Herald’s deputy investigations editor, told The Associated Press.
The layoffs arrive as publishers experiment with artificial intelligence capable of turning existing reporting into more material, faster. The collision raises a question that extends beyond the newspaper business: Can the supply of news keep expanding while the capacity to discover it contracts?
A Crisis Bigger Than One Chain
McClatchy’s cuts follow major reductions at other prominent news organizations.
The Washington Post announced layoffs affecting roughly one-third of its staff in February 2026, with cuts reaching sports, local and international coverage, AP reported.
The Los Angeles Times cut 115 newsroom positions in January 2024, followed by layoffs affecting 14 union members on May 2, 2025, according to the Los Angeles Times Guild’s announcement reported by SFGATE.
Even the wire services supplying other outlets are restructuring. In April 2026, AP offered buyouts as it accelerated its shift toward visual journalism and new revenue sources. Its union said more than 120 represented employees received offers; that was the number offered buyouts, not confirmed departures. AP said big newspaper companies accounted for just 10% of its revenue.
These developments sit atop a much longer decline. Northwestern University’s 2025 State of Local News report found that the newspaper industry had lost more than three-quarters of its jobs since 2005. This measure encompasses the broader industry, not journalists alone. Nearly 40% of local U.S. newspapers had disappeared.
Some 50 million Americans lived in counties with limited or no local news access.
A publication can also survive while its ability to scrutinize a community weakens. A functioning website does not reveal how many meetings go uncovered or how many unanswered questions never become assignments.
Dallas Has Already Seen The Trade-Off
The pressure has also reached the editing desks that help protect a publication’s accuracy.
As The Dallas Express reported in November 2025, the Dallas News Guild said Hearst’s outsourcing plans would affect 26 members at The Dallas Morning News, including its copy desk and print production operations.
In a statement provided to DX, the newspaper said print page design would move to an external partner in March 2026. Management also said 18 new newsroom roles would be created and described the restructuring as a way to support reporting and digital investment.
A Media Operator independently reported the plans, citing the Guild’s 26-position tally and obtaining confirmation from The Dallas Morning News that print page design would move to an external partner in March.
Industry-wide tension remains: Management presents centralized production as a way to preserve reporting resources while employees see valued colleagues and local expertise being removed. Those announced changes concern outsourcing, not demonstrated replacement by AI.
Copy editing is more than correcting punctuation. It can mean catching a misleading headline, an unsupported assertion or a discrepancy between a quotation and its source. Moving that work does not automatically make it worse, but the quality and capacity of the replacement process matter.
Why The Money Stopped Working
The financial collapse began well before today’s generative AI.
Newspapers historically sold advertisers access to a geographically concentrated audience. Advertising helped support a bundle of coverage, including reporting that mattered publicly even when it attracted relatively few readers.
That support eroded as advertising and audiences moved online. Pew Research Center’s historical figures put U.S. newspaper advertising revenue at approximately $49.4 billion in 2005, compared with an estimated $9.8 billion in 2022. Those are nominal dollars; the decline was already enormous without adjusting for inflation.
McClatchy’s management framed its latest decision around subscriber demand. An internal memo, reported by TheWrap, said consumer revenue had declined 41% while local news expenses remained flat. That figure reflects management’s internal assessment.
“We cannot continue investing where subscriber interest does not support the investment,” per the memo.
There is a real financial constraint in that statement. Reporting requires salaries, time and resources. But measuring the value of an individual article also poses a problem: A government investigation can benefit people who never subscribe, while a popular story may reveal little that was previously unknown.
AI search introduces another pressure. In a 2025 study of browsing activity from 900 U.S. adults, Pew found that users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits to Google pages with AI summaries, versus 15% without them. Links inside the summaries received clicks in just 1% of visits.
The study was observational and covered Google searches generally, not solely news. Still, it illustrates a vulnerability for publishers: Their reporting can help answer a question without bringing the reader to the organization that paid to investigate it.
More Versions, Fewer Original Questions
McClatchy’s AI experiments have already drawn objections from its journalists.
In January, Columbia Journalism Review documented disputes over AI repackaging reporters’ work, including summaries and listicles that journalists said sometimes introduced errors.
TheWrap subsequently described a tool called a “content scaling agent” that allowed editors to create repurposed versions of existing reporting under new headlines.
That establishes a connection between the company’s strategy and journalists’ concerns. It does not establish that AI directly replaced each employee affected by September’s layoffs.
The distinction matters because technology can perform very different jobs. Helping a reporter search documents can advance an investigation. Rewriting an existing article may make it more accessible. Neither automatically supplies a new interview, a newly obtained record or an independent confirmation.
Speed itself is not the enemy of accuracy. Urgent, verified reporting has obvious value during a storm, a public safety emergency or an election. The danger comes when speed and volume displace the work required to establish what happened.
Consider a hypothetical chain: One outlet publishes an allegation. A second summarizes it. A third cites the second. An AI answer combines all three.
A reader may encounter several apparently supporting sources when the underlying evidence still consists of one allegation.
Attribution can make that chain honest. Independent reporting can strengthen it. Repetition alone cannot.
Truth Does Not Become Stronger By Trending
The problem is documented beyond newsroom anecdotes.
In research published in March 2025, Columbia’s Tow Center tested eight AI search tools with 1,600 queries asking them to identify news articles from supplied excerpts. More than 60% of responses were incorrect under the study’s criteria. Researchers also found fabricated links and citations pointing to copied or syndicated material.
That was a specific source-identification test of tools available at the time, not a finding that 60% of all AI-generated news is false. Its relevance is nevertheless direct: A confident answer can conceal a broken trail back to the evidence.
Truth remains distinguishable from popularity. A quotation can be checked against a recording. A claimed expenditure can be compared with a contract. An allegation can be tested against documents, witnesses and the response of the person accused.
What becomes harder in an overcrowded information market is showing readers which of those steps actually occurred.
A link is useful, but its presence does not establish that it supports the sentence beside it. An original quotation adds value when it contributes relevant firsthand knowledge; originality alone does not make a source truthful.
AP’s published guidance on generative AI offers a practical starting point: Treat its output as “unvetted source material” subject to editorial judgment and sourcing standards.
For a newsroom, that means checking quotations against originals, following consequential claims to supporting evidence, distinguishing allegations from findings, and making corrections visible. Those obligations persist regardless of who—or what—produced the first draft.
The difficulty is that verification consumes the same time and staffing that publishers are trying to conserve.
A Local Nonprofit Model
The Dallas Express operates through a locally based nonprofit model. Dallas Express Media is a 501(c)(3) organization, and its published roster identifies a core team responsible for editing, investigative reporting, production, technology, and management.
CEO Chris Putnam has tied the publication’s growth to its newsroom’s work.
In a November 26, 2025, announcement, Putnam said DX had been invited to participate in the White House’s New Media Program and would receive its first White House press credentials. The announcement reported more than 200% audience growth that year and more than 250,000 daily newsletter recipients.
A concrete example of DX’s approach preceded that announcement.
In December 2024, investigative reporter Carlos Turcios examined then-Rep. Kay Granger’s prolonged absence from congressional voting. The reporting included checking her voting record, calling her offices and visiting her district office, where DX found a locked door and covered window.
The story began with a question about a public official’s availability to her constituents. Answering it required attempts to reach people and a visit to a physical location; work that could not be accomplished simply by rewriting an existing headline.
Putnam later cited the Granger investigation as an example of local reporting that attracted national attention.
This example reveals an essential part of the news supply: reporting that generates information for others to examine, verify and follow.
DX’s support model offers recurring memberships, individual donations, major gifts, advertising and corporate sponsorship opportunities to sustain a free digital publication. Its ethics code commits it to retaining editorial control and separating news decisions from donor support.
This model offers a way to support reporting without charging every reader for access. It also depends on sustained financial support and public trust.
The quality of the work remains the test.
A Future Worth Reporting
The future is not limited to automated summaries and disappearing desks.
Northwestern tracked more than 300 local news startups over five years. New funding and ownership approaches offer possibilities, although the researchers cautioned that philanthropic support remains concentrated in urban areas and new outlets are not replacing all the losses.
As such, AI can help journalists look deeper. CalMatters’ Digital Democracy project combines AI and government data to make legislative activity, public hearings, votes and political money easier to examine.
That application points toward a useful test for newsroom technology: Does it help uncover something readers could not otherwise see?
The same question applies to business decisions. Savings from automation can support additional reporting, or become a reason to employ fewer people. Faster production can create room for follow-up questions. Those are choices about priorities.
There is a risk that news becomes the informational equivalent of a frozen waffle: mass-produced, quickly reheated and consumed each morning with little thought about what went into it.
A convenient summary has a place. The concern is what disappears before the summary is made: the unexpected answer, the overlooked document, the person whose experience complicates an easy narrative.
The test of the next newsroom will be how much it can discover, verify, and explain, not merely how much it can publish.
After the layoffs, the meetings continue and the contracts get signed.
The work of asking questions that matter and building trust with our readers continues at The Dallas Express. Keeping that work alive requires more than a faster way to fill a screen. It requires people, support and the conviction that there is still something worth finding out.
Provided by Dallas Express
