The Rabbit Hole: Covering What McClatchy Will Miss

Editor’s Note: There is an intangible benefit to covering the criminal justice beat over time. It takes a while, but you start to get a sense of the humans behind the stories. When the prosecutor brings a large coffee cup instead of a small one into the courtroom, you realize that typically means she thinks the case is weak and is prepared for a long detention hearing. Or that the senior judge subconsciously only schedules the cases he’ll rule against the plaintiffs in the morning, and the ones that end in a loss for defendants in the afternoon. You find, over time, that your local clerk always uploads newly unsealed court records on Thursday evening after the early workweek rush of responsibilities subsides. Maybe they don’t even realize their tells, but a good court reporter always does. This month, McClatchy fired dozens of reporters around the country, with a not-so-subtle pivot to A.I. to cover the gap. But Claude can’t read people, and it should as hell can’t read a courtroom. For The Rabbit Hole this week, reporter Peter Beck interviews those recently laid off reporters and takes a look at what reporting is lost when one of the largest American newspaper chains decides it can do less with less, gambling with the belief that you’ll still buy the news, even in its diminished form. -Seamus

McClatchy laid off nearly a hundred journalists this month. Newsrooms in Charlotte, Kansas City, Miami, Fort Worth, Sacramento, and at least a dozen others across the country shrank. 

At first glance, the 90 journalists seem like just a drop in the bucket of a reporting industry that employs thousands. The better analogy, however, is yet another nail in the coffin. Since 2004, newspapers have cut 77 percent of their payroll, the worst among the 532 industries the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks. And since 2000, reporting and editing jobs have been slashed 56 and 63 percent, respectively. 

The recent round of McClatchy layoffs signals there’s more pain for newsrooms to come, but the picture of what the United States loses with the extinction of local news is already clear. It’s happening in Lexington, Kentucky, where half of the staff received notices last week. In Charlotte, North Carolina’s most populous area, the McClatchy-owned newspaper dropped to just 25 positions—the paper had 300 two decades ago. And it’s happening in Idaho and Washington state, where the cuts hit hardest last week. 

At the Idaho Statesman, the state’s flagship newspaper based out of Boise, the newsroom was more than halved during the cuts, from 22 to nine full-time journalists. The nine journalists now have the impossible task of covering Idaho’s 1.8 million residents, living across more than 80,000 square miles. 

The Idaho News Guild, a labor union representing most of the laid-off journalists, told Court Watch: “These layoffs create immediate holes in our state and leave it poorer. There are now fewer eyes watching your elected officials. There are now fewer reporters investigating shady businesses. And there are now fewer journalists to highlight and celebrate our community’s unsung heroes.”

Alex Brizee, a criminal justice reporter who’s been at the Idaho Statesman since 2022, said in an interview, “To lose more than half our newsroom, I don’t know how we’re supposed to do the paper anymore.”

In neighboring Washington, the layoffs impacted all the McClatchy-owned papers, including the Bellingham Herald, the Olympian, the Tacoma News Tribune, and the Tri-City Herald in Kennewick. Two local government reporters, an investigative journalist, and a two-time statewide award-winning sports journalist were among those whose positions were targeted, according to the News Guild, a national union for journalists.

Shea Johnson, a senior investigative reporter at the Tacoma News Tribune who was part of the layoffs, told Court Watch, “The News Tribune’s remaining staff, who are incredibly talented journalists, will be stretched even thinner. That can only lead to less time for in-depth reporting.” “In a larger newsroom, I was the [Tribune’s] lone investigative reporter, and I had to, even then, manage other workload, including a civil courts beat,” Johnson continued. His last day is October 9th.

McClatchy, for its part, appears to be experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI) to attempt to fill the large shoes left by senior reporters. A week after the cuts, McClatchy executives sent an all-staff email introducing new hires in the private equity-owned company’s “Content Innovation Lab,” an initiative to publish more AI-generated articles at McClatchy newspapers across the country. Journalists quickly pointed out an uptick in AI-generated content on the websites of McClatchy-owned media outlets shortly after the layoff announcement.

During a contentious town hall with employees in May, McClatchy chief executive Tony Hunter warned of the company’s precipitous profits, warning that embracing AI may be the news conglomerate’s only saving grace. “We have a company-wide effort to agentify the entire enterprise,” Hunter reportedly said. 

An email to a McClatchy spokesperson inquiring about the company’s future and requesting comment for this piece went unanswered prior to publication.

As with so many problems plaguing society, the courts underscore the reporting and transparency that have been lost. If you’re curious about societal problems such as education gaps or healthcare inequities, look to the courts. To learn about what divides families and how businesses fail, read public filings. To examine the state of local news, see the stories that media outlets are and aren’t able to cover. 

Since McClatchy’s cuts, the answer to what went uncovered in Washington and Idaho is glaring: a civil case alleging decades-old sexual abuse at an elementary school and YMCA summer camp; an insider trading plea deal; a civil liberties case accusing local police of a warrantless search, with corroborating video; and dozens of habeas suits challenging immigration detention.

Many of these cases are pending in the Western District of Washington, one of the state’s two federal court districts, which stretches the state’s Pacific coastline, from Oregon up to Seattle and the Canadian border, and into its interior as far as the Cascade Mountain range. President Biden appointed all of its seven active U.S. district judges, making it one of the federal judiciary’s youngest benches. 

The district is home to two federal courthouses in Tacoma and Seattle, as well as three of the McClatchy-owned newspapers in Washington. Only two of the seven judges primarily preside over cases in Tacoma, Washington’s second most populous city, where Johnson is a reporter for the News Tribune.

“The legal system can be complex. It takes experience to navigate and decipher it for readers. But underneath the courts’ framework and legalese, there’s often a mine of interesting stories,” Johnson told Court Watch. “The civil court system can reveal alleged wrongdoing by public agencies or how much taxpayer money is being spent to resolve cases or pay judgments,” he added. 

Brizee shared a similar sentiment about her reporting on the criminal justice system, “ It's a beat that the more time you spend in it, the more you’re gonna learn, the more you’re gonna understand things. I feel like I’ve gained a lot of trust from attorneys in the area because I've been talking to them for five years.”

Studies show fewer local journalists mean increased corruption, less transparency, higher polarization, and more wasted tax dollars. One case challenging government transparency in Washington’s Western District perhaps comes from an unlikely plaintiff: a 22-year-old former U.S. Army Soldier who was sentenced on Friday to 70 months in federal prison for a cyber extortion scheme that attempted to steal more than $1 million from Verizon and AT&T customers. 

The ex-soldier’s complaint in the civil case? His paper copy of The Wall Street Journal wasn’t arriving fast enough through the Bureau of Prisons’ mail intake process. Although a minor lawsuit, local media did not report the former soldier’s frustrations with his prison’s mail department or the more significant outcome of his sentencing hearing prior to this piece’s publication.

Another civil case challenging bureaucratic opacity targeted Seattle’s school system. The plaintiffs, the parents of a 15-year-old daughter who is diagnosed with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and ADHD, accused the Seattle School District of conducting an arbitrary process to remove her from the district’s courses for students struggling with learning disabilities and ignoring an administrative law judge’s order to return her to the class. The case, too, went unreported.

“Meaningful reporting can be built off an issue first identified in a court filing,” according to Johnson, who covers civil cases in addition to his investigative reporting. “Now that I’ll be gone, The News Tribune will have to either task another reporter with adding civil courts to their already packed list of responsibilities or risk missing out on potentially impactful stories,” Johnson told Court Watch.

More than three other impactful stories from court dockets have flown under the media’s radar thus far. On Thursday, September 24, a man sued Oracle, the technology giant whose owner has also upended the media industry, over claims the company fired him after he had to take time off to care for his son while he suffered from a “serious health condition.” Oracle has not yet responded to the civil suit, and a judge has not ruled on its merits.

In Tacoma this week, the victim of an alleged abuser, who worked as a public school teacher and YMCA camp counselor, sued the school district and the YMCA for purportedly failing to prevent his “systematic” abuse in 1979 and 1980. In 2024, a state jury awarded a $7.5 million verdict to a different victim of the same alleged abuser.

Among the Washington state quartet of McClatchy papers, some of their proudest reporting has been their coverage of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown. The Tri-City Herald analyzed arrest data for insight into local ICE activity and examined whether immigration agents had misused municipal Flock cameras, a topic that rose to controversy over the summer. And on September 12, the News Tribune published an article titled, “Mass Transfers from Tacoma ICE lockup leave lawyers and families scrambling.”

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That scramble has led to dozens of habeas cases filed each week in Washington and Idaho alleging violations of due process and civil liberties. On Thursday, a woman who court records state identifies as Eritrean successfully obtained a temporary restraining order preventing immigration officials from deporting her. She had been detained on Monday and was reportedly told by immigration agents that she would be sent to Cameroon. However, court records indicate that an immigration judge had granted her request to withhold removal in April 2020.

The Eritrean woman’s case went unreported, and so did the overwhelming majority of other habeas petitions. Court officials do not allow habeas petitions to be filed electronically, given that the forms often contain personal information, so reporters can only view the documents in person at courthouses. 

Fewer journalists means even fewer habeas cases will be noticed, which can have a life-altering impact. Reporting might draw the attention of a nonprofit network or a legal aid organization, and habeas petitions are much more likely to succeed with legal representation. With so many habeas cases and an ever-fewer number of reporters and resources allocated to covering immigration proceedings, the chance that a noncitizen’s petition for relief will gain outside attention is inching closer to lottery-level odds.

The story is similar in Idaho, but with even fewer dockets to cover. The state has just one federal judicial district with two active U.S. district judges, including Chief Judge Amanda Brailsford, a Biden appointee, and Judge David Nye, who has the rare distinction of having been nominated to the bench by both President Obama and President Trump. Created in 1891, Idaho's federal bench has had only 13 appointed judges in its history. 

Seven counties in Idaho lack a single newspaper; most of the state’s active local papers publish on only a weekly basis. The federal courthouses are in Coeur d’Alene, Pocatello, and Boise, where the Idaho Statesman is based.

Brizee, one of the seven reporters spared from this round of McClatchy layoffs, was candid about the challenges the cuts will incur: “ I don’t understand how this is going to work.” “I can’t imagine that I’m gonna be able to cover courts the way I do now,” she continued.

The biggest news on the docket this week—a local CEO and one-time Boise police officer indicted for allegedly running a Russian front company—drew some media attention. But that didn’t happen for several other cases filed over the past two weeks with possible repercussions for Idaho communities.

On September 14th, the Justice Department filed a complaint on behalf of the EPA accusing a couple of destroying $30,000 worth of habitat in a salmon restoration project run by Idaho’s Department of Fish and Game. On September 16th, a couple sued the City of Idaho Falls after a video of local law enforcement entering their home over protests went viral, prompting the police department to issue a press release. The statement led to a second video criticizing the officers’ conduct and the department’s response, which has received more than 2.5 million views on YouTube. And on Monday, September 21st, a man pleaded guilty to insider trading after reaching a deal with prosecutors in which he admitted to profiting almost $50,000 from a $99,350.27 trade.

None of these cases were reported. Neither was a case of a man charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm. Brizee said she wouldn’t be surprised if the layoffs further decreased the Statesman’s federal courts coverage, adding, “I think our local coverage of state cases will shrink as well.” Brizee told Court Watch she didn’t know of any other reporters in Idaho whose job was solely responsible for covering criminal courts.

“ If I’m naming someone in a story, their life is now being changed because I've written about them,” Brizee said about the moral pitfalls of covering the criminal justice system. “It’s still my job to make sure I’m telling the story in the most fair and accurate way, whether or not they committed whatever crime they committed, and no matter who they are, or how high-profile their case is.”

She ended by saying, referring to the notorious alleged killer of four college students, “Whether or not they’re the Bryan Kohberger cases of the world or not, everyone deserves that equity and fairness to their case, and then they also deserve a story at the end that talks about why they did the crimes they did. The victims deserve that too.”

It’s a tall, and very human, task that McClatchy’s new Content Innovation Lab now might be used to fill.

The laid-off journalists at the Idaho Statesman had reported on dilapidated schools, leading to a $2 billion state investment. They had covered mass shootings. And written award-winning editorials and columns. The state of transparency and public accountability in Idaho will surely suffer without them. With the cuts, the same will now be true for a dozen other newspapers around the country. 

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