Within a week of announcing layoffs affecting more than ninety unionized journalists at thirteen newspapers, McClatchy sent an internal email celebrating five new hires from August. Among them were two reporters and three editors for the company's new artificial intelligence-powered Content Innovation Lab, according to reporting by Straight Arrow News.
The lab is not producing news. It is producing what company executives call content — lifestyle articles about travel, food, outdoor recreation, college sports, and crime, repackaged for national and regional audiences using AI tools. One job listing offered up to $106,000 to use "AI-powered insights to grow passionate followers" interested in "golf, camping, backpacking, outdoor gear and seasonal events." A new McClatchy vertical called Student Section carries the tagline "Powered by TrendHunter," referencing the consumer-trend AI company McClatchy acquired two years ago.
What is running on the sites
Technical analysis by Originality, an AI-detection firm, found that AI-generated content accounted for up to 12 percent of articles at the Kansas City Star and the Miami Herald between June and August, with the share reaching 20 percent in some months. Some articles ran under the bylines of journalists who had not written them. Others ran under the names of TrendHunter content specialists publishing rosemary oil promotions on papers with decades of investigative track records.
McClatchy's Content Scaling Agent is the internal tool enabling this. It repackages human-written articles at varying lengths for different audiences. Unions representing McClatchy employees in Washington state, Sacramento, and Idaho filed grievances when the tool was introduced without the thirty-day notice required under their collective bargaining agreements. In some newsrooms, management agreed to attach editor names rather than reporter bylines to CSA-generated articles.
The CEO framed the strategy directly in an internal town hall in May: the company has "a company-wide effort to agentify the entire enterprise." The meeting, held off the record, was recorded and obtained by Straight Arrow.
The economics behind the pivot
McClatchy's executive vice president of local news told journalists in a September email that consumer revenue had fallen 41 percent over five years. The company declared bankruptcy in 2020 and has been owned by hedge fund Chatham Asset Management since. The same fund also owns Us Weekly and In Touch Weekly, which merged with McClatchy's publishing assets in 2024.
The strategic logic is comprehensible. The advertising revenue that once sustained local papers has migrated to platforms where AI controls targeting and bidding — Meta's Advantage+ platform passed a $75 billion annual run rate — and the economics of local display advertising have never recovered from that shift. Digital advertising and subscriber revenue at regional papers is structurally insufficient to support the reporting operations those papers built during the print era. AI-generated lifestyle content is cheaper to produce than accountability journalism, scales nationally, and serves audiences that were never the Miami Herald's core readership.
What it does not do is serve the communities the papers were built to cover. The journalists laid off in September included government reporters, education writers, and photographers who had spent careers developing the source relationships and institutional knowledge that are not transferable to a content-scaling agent. Those beats will not be covered by an AI article about kegel devices and rosemary oil.
The independent media economics question has been growing in parallel, alongside the broader wave of layoffs and consolidation that has been reshaping the industry all year,: what fills the gap when regional papers exit the accountability journalism business. The McClatchy model does not propose an answer to that question. It exits the question.
Topics mediajournalismAIlocal newslayoffspublishing
