McClatchy Cuts Newsrooms While McKinsey Promises AI Will Add Jobs

McKinsey & Company's Global Institute said this week that 11 million American workers may have to switch occupations entirely by 2035. That is 6.5 percent of the labor force, reshaped by artificial intelligence¹. The same report found the country will hold more jobs in 2035 than it holds today. AI-linked sectors and the wider economy are set to add roughly 40 million positions against 36 million lost to automation¹. "The next decade's challenge is mobility, not scarcity," the report said¹.

Read quickly, that math reads as relief. Automation destroys jobs, and AI-linked growth replaces them, so the net count comes out ahead. Eleven million retrainings counts as a manageable toll for an economy that grows on balance. The report leaves out where the new jobs will land: the same building as the old ones, a different city, or someone else's hands entirely. Newspapers are already living inside that gap.

McClatchy laid off more than 90 unionized journalists on Sept. 10. The cuts hit 13 newspapers in eight states, some by as much as a third². Miami Herald lost more than 30 editorial positions, over a third of its staff². The Idaho Statesman lost 13 of its 22 staff members the same week, one of the largest cuts anywhere in the chain⁴. Management told employees that consumer revenue had declined 41 percent while local news expenses stayed flat².

The cuts follow McClatchy's rollout of its Content Scaling Agent, a tool that generates rewritten and repurposed versions of the chain's own reporting under new headlines³. Greg Farmer, the company's executive vice president of local news, told staff in a May webinar that resisting the tool risked the business itself: "Can we overcome that threat, can we walk through that fear, can we climb the cross of the moment and work together to solve our problems?"³ The tool published more than 1,000 stories and drew more than 7 million page views by that spring. McClatchy's own count found four of its five best-performing articles that April were AI-made³.

Jon Schleuss, president of the NewsGuild, called the reasoning dishonest on X the day the cuts landed: "You can't pivot to AI, cut 40% of your local journalists and write 'we remain deeply committed to local journalism.' You're lying"². His accusation lines up with the arithmetic in McClatchy's own memo. The chain expanded its AI-written output the same season it removed the reporters who once might have caught the AI's mistakes.

Newsrooms face a second pressure apart from McClatchy's own tool. A field experiment by researchers at the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon University found that Google's AI Overviews cut outbound organic clicks by 38 percent. Readers who still clicked through spent about the same time on the page⁶. Federal Judge Amit Mehta, weighing publishers' antitrust suit against Google, said in August that the arrangement struck him as deeply lopsided. Google trains its AI on the same journalism its summaries keep readers from reaching⁵.

The newspaper business has stood in this spot before. Craigslist built its business on classified ads alone. It gave that space away for free, and researchers at NYU and Harvard later put the industry's loss at more than $5 billion between 2000 and 2007⁷. Reporters lost jobs to a company built entirely outside journalism then. The pattern returns now aimed at the articles themselves, a different product carrying a bigger name behind it: Google.

Ask who pays for this. The answer sits close to home: reporters at the Miami Herald and the Idaho Statesman, whose beats close along with their jobs. Follow who profits. Google, headquartered in Mountain View, keeps the reader's click and the advertising that comes with it. McClatchy's executives, including chief executive Tony Hunter, approved a strategy that shrinks the newsroom that supplies the raw reporting AI depends on.

The risk falls on readers in Boise and Miami. They lose reporters who once covered city council meetings wire services skip entirely.

McKinsey may turn out right that the country adds more jobs than it loses by 2035. Newspapers already show what that count hides. The loser and the winner rarely share a building, and the industry losing right now is the one that used to tell the country what happened to it.

Readers who want that industry's numbers tracked one newsroom at a time can join The Signal, AI Lately's daily email, and get them delivered each morning.

Sources

1. Alicia Wallace, "AI Could Force 11 Million US Workers Into New Careers by 2035," Yahoo Finance (CNN Business), Sept. 29, 2026, https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/ai-could-force-11-million-142557785.html
2. Tess Patton, "McClatchy Guts Newsrooms Nationwide Months After Controversial Push to AI," TheWrap, Sept. 10, 2026, https://www.thewrap.com/media-platforms/journalism/mcclatchy-newspapers-layoffs-ai-tool/
3. Mark Keierleber, "Newspaper Chain's Executives Tell Journalists to Accept AI or Face Ruin," Straight Arrow News, June 2, 2026, https://san.com/cc/this-major-newspaper-chain-is-bleeding-money-can-ai-generated-content-turn-around-its-fortunes/
4. Riddhi Setty, "McClatchy's Post-Layoff Future," Columbia Journalism Review, Sept. 17, 2026, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/mcclatchys-post-layoff-future-artificial-intelligence-ai-labor-union.php
5. Roger Montti, "'Seems Really Unfair': Judge Pushes Back Against Google in AI Overviews Suit," Search Engine Journal, Aug. 27, 2026, https://www.searchenginejournal.com/judge-in-penske-vs-google-says-ai-situation-seems-really-unfair/587216/
6. Saharsh Agarwal and Ananya Sen, "The Impact of Google AI Overviews on Publisher Traffic and User Experience: Evidence from a Field Experiment," SSRN, June 17, 2026, https://ssrn.com/abstract=6513059
7. Agence France-Presse, "Craigslist Costs US Newspapers Billions: Study," Phys.org, Aug. 14, 2013, https://phys.org/news/2013-08-craigslist-newspapers-billions.html