McClatchy Cuts 32 Miami Herald Jobs in Major Newsroom Layoffs

More than a third of the Herald’s editorial staff was cut as its parent company slashed jobs across newsrooms nationwide.

MIAMI — The Miami Herald lost 32 employees Thursday in a major round of layoffs by parent company McClatchy Media, cutting more than a third of the newspaper’s editorial staff.

The cuts also wiped out the writing staff of the Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald, according to the Associated Press.

They were part of a much larger round of layoffs across McClatchy. More than 90 unionized employees at 17 newspapers lost their jobs, according to the NewsGuild, which represents workers at the company.

The layoffs hit newsrooms from Miami to Sacramento, Kansas City and Charlotte, but the cuts at the Herald were among the deepest.

Among those laid off was longtime Miami Herald sports columnist Greg Cote, whose career at the newspaper spanned more than five decades.

Cote confirmed his departure Sunday.

“After 54 years with the Miami Herald, I was laid off Thursday,” Cote wrote in a post announcing that he would speak about the decision on his podcast Monday.

Cote has been a fixture of South Florida sports coverage for decades and is also widely known for his appearances on The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz.

The layoffs reached well beyond sports.

Carol Marbin Miller, the Herald’s deputy investigations editor, told the Associated Press that Thursday's cuts were the worst she had seen in her 25 years at the newspaper.

McClatchy Executive Vice President of Local News Greg Farmer told employees the company was changing how it decides where to put its resources.

“We can no longer invest in work that does not attract enough subscribers to justify its cost,” Farmer wrote in a memo obtained by the AP.

The NewsGuild blasted the decision.

The union said the layoffs included reporters covering local government, immigration and investigative beats, along with photographers and other newsroom employees. It warned that the cuts would leave communities with fewer journalists watching the institutions that affect them.

For Miami, the loss of El Nuevo Herald's writing staff is especially notable. The Spanish-language newspaper has served Miami-Dade's large Spanish-speaking population for decades alongside the Herald.

The layoffs are the latest contraction for a newspaper that once maintained a considerably larger operation in South Florida.

McClatchy filed for bankruptcy in 2020 and was later acquired by hedge fund Chatham Asset Management. Like newspaper companies across the country, it has spent years cutting costs while trying to build a business around digital subscriptions as print circulation and advertising declined.

Thursday's layoffs leave the Miami Herald to cover one of the country's largest metropolitan areas with a newsroom suddenly more than 30 positions smaller.

For some of the journalists who survived previous rounds of cuts, this one felt different.

“I've been through a lot of layoffs,” Miller told the AP.

“Nothing like this.”