Last week, McClatchy made sweeping layoffs at newsrooms across the country, including in its hometown of Sacramento.
The publishing company owns 30 newspapers including the Sacramento Bee, Modesto Bee and Fresno Bee. The Sacramento Bee, the newspaper of record for the Sacramento area, has eliminated its entire sports department and team of editorial writers, along with other positions.
CapRadio reached out to McClatchy for details on the layoffs, but has not yet received a response.
The entire opinion section at the Bee has been cut as well. Insight host Vicki Gonzalez spoke with Robin Epley, an opinion writer for the Bee who has been laid off.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview Highlights
I just want to check in with you. The news came out Thursday, how are you doing?
I’ve been vacillating between crying a lot and being angry and feeling like, maybe this is time for a change, and this is a blessing handed down, I just don’t see it yet. But really, it’s just been overwhelming and exhausting.
I’ve been joking that I sort of feel like Tom Sawyer at my own funeral, watching everybody kind of bring in the news and express their apologies, but I don’t know what’s next. I don’t know what to do.
It’s important to mention, in 2018, you were a Pulitzer Prize finalist with the Chico Enterprise for coverage of the Camp Fire. You have a long career as a journalist, you’re also born and raised in Sacramento, so I imagine the Bee holds a special place in your heart.
It does, I remember reading the Bee as a little girl when my job as a child was to take the stacks of newspapers out to the trash can every Sunday, and I would read them on my way to the recycling bin, and my mom would have to come and get me because I’d be so caught up reading the paper.
It has always been a dream of mine to work for my hometown paper. When I got the job five years ago, I was ecstatic. It meant I could come home and be closer to family and knowing the city I’m working in has been such a joy and a blessing. It has been an incredible five years, and I’m sorry it ended this way.
At the Bee specifically, do you have a good gauge of who was impacted by these layoffs and cuts?
Yeah, I believe the number is around 12 or 13 people at the Bee. Specifically, we had the entire editorial board, with the exception of our editor, was cut. That includes Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Phillip, who was a columnist on my team. That was me, that was our Op-Eds Editor Hannah Holzer, Cathie Anderson, who has been at the Bee for 24 years. It also included people on the news side, our entire sports team, Joe Davidson and Chris Biderman, and really difficult for me, when I heard the news, was they laid off Joe Rubin, who was an incredible investigative reporter for the Bee who did stuff like he broke the news about the alleged bribery attempt of Flo Cofer after the election, the first class travel by the Sacramento police chief, the worker deaths and the understaffing at Cal-OSHA.
Joe Rubin is an incredible reporter, and it really just drives home the total lack of reasoning behind these layoffs. It wasn’t anything anybody did. And I think we could have won all the awards in the world, and we could have been doing the most amazing work, and we were doing amazing work for our community. And at the end of the day, it does not matter to [McClatchy’s hedge fund owners].
The New York Times’s reported a McClatchy executive said the company maintained its local news investment for the past five years, but revenue dropped 41% over that time while expenses stayed flat, and it required a different choice.
Did you feel that in your time at the Sacramento Bee, did executives, or just the powers that be, did they communicate worries or concern about a drop in revenue?
Yes and no. I think all companies are worried about drops in revenue, but I don’t think it was as serious as they’re making it out to be. I think they very much cherry pick their numbers when reporting. And, there’s not any journalists around to fact check them on that because they’ve gotten rid of all of them.
I think that The Bee, like any other newspaper, has had its struggles. We’re not so foolish as to think that everybody’s picking up a paper in the morning like they used to. But I think the company has made some very specific choices not to update its website, to not follow through on vertical video or social media. Those are really tough decisions, and I think that it has led to the crisis that we’re seeing now.
But that’s not the fault of the reporters at the Bee or anywhere else, who are doing incredible work and still deserve our support. It is really the faceless asset management hedge fund that is making these decisions. They don’t know us, and they don’t care about our community.
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