It’s Another Awful Week for Newspaper Layoffs; Remembering 9/11, 25 Years Later–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Sept. 11, 2026

Indy Digest: Sept. 11, 2026

This has been an awful week for newspaper layoffs.

First up: McClatchy. The New York Times (gift link) reports:

McClatchy, the newspaper chain that owns The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee and 28 other newspapers, made deep job cuts on Thursday to newsrooms across the country.

At The Herald, more than 30 roles were cut—more than a third of the editorial staff—while the newsroom of its sister paper, the Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald, was almost completely eliminated, five people with knowledge of the layoffs said.

At outlets in the Pacific Northwest, including The Bellingham Herald in Washington and The Idaho Statesman in Boise, 17 journalists, about a third of unionized workers, were jettisoned, according to the union, the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild. At The Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky, 13 of the 23 newsroom employees were laid off. …

Greg Farmer, the chain’s executive vice president of local news, was blunt in an email to McClatchy newsrooms on Thursday afternoon. “We cannot continue investing where subscriber interest does not support the investment,” he wrote.

He said McClatchy had maintained its level of investment in local news for the past five years, but that consumer revenue during that time had dropped 41 percent while expenses had stayed flat, requiring “a different choice.” McClatchy will instead invest in journalism that “is differentiated, consequential and difficult to replicate; reporting rooted in our communities and strengthened by sources, investigation, verification, context and judgment,” he said in the email, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.

Apparently, journalism that “is differentiated, consequential and difficult to replicate” does not include sports coverage.

Awful Announcing, which covers the sports-media industry, reports:

The final three sports journalists on the Sacramento Bee staff were axed this week as part of wide-ranging layoffs by its hedge fund-owned parent company, McClatchy.

The McClatchy layoffs affected dozens of local newspapers across the U.S., but the cuts at the Bee are particularly devastating for sports fans in the city, which currently hosts two pro sports teams. McClatchy laid off Kings beat reporter Jason Anderson, 49ers beat reporter Chris Biderman, and high school sports reporter Joe Davidson.

The Bee had also covered the Athletics, who played in Sacramento ahead of their move to Las Vegas in 2028. …

Local newspapers have hemorrhaged subscribers and resources for decades. Investment firms like McClatchy have exacerbated these issues, gutting these outlets to maximize profit while coverage and accountability wane.

Props to Awful Announcing for adding that last graph of context. The New York Times did as well, reporting later in their story: “McClatchy has newspapers in 14 states. Formerly a family-run business, it was sold to the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management in 2020 after it declared bankruptcy.”

Ugh.

Next up: Lee Enterprises. Poynter reports:

Journalists at Lee Enterprises—the chain that owns such titles as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Omaha World-Herald—are well accustomed to cuts at the end of the summer, as the company prepares for the close of its fiscal year.

But this year, some hoped that things would be different. Thanks to a $50 million deal in February, billionaire David Hoffmann had become the majority shareholder and chairman of the company. He came bearing a message of renewed investment in the chain—one he repeated in interviews, during quarterly earnings calls and in a set of profiles that ran on the front page of every Lee paper. “NEW HOPE FOR LOCAL NEWS,” the profiles called Hoffmann.

That hope shattered late last month, when Lee began laying off editors and copy editors at papers across the country. It is unclear exactly how many were affected, but at least two papers lost their top editors. Some papers have also cut travel and freelance budgets. While the scale of the layoffs appears to be much smaller than past rounds of mass cuts, they raise questions about the plans of a man who has repeatedly boasted about his ability to avoid laying off employees at his businesses.

“He says the right things,” said Mark Plemmons, the former editor of the Independent Tribune in Concord, North Carolina, who was laid off Aug. 25. At the time of his layoff, he was the only person working in news or sports at the paper. “The reality of what’s being done does not appear to follow that.”

I’ve said it many times before, and I’ll say it many times again: If you don’t support the news sources you value, they will die.

Save the Date!

If you have questions about the upcoming election—specifically, the whopping 14 state propositions on the November ballot—please join me and our partners from CalMatters for a community conversation regarding the ballot questions at 5:30 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 22, at a Palm Springs venue TBD.

This will be a free event, open to all—and refreshments will be served!

CalMatters’ Dan Hu will break down, analyze and answer your burning questions about this year’s ballot questions, in a conversation centered around the latest edition of their Voter Guide.

Watch this space for finalized details and RSVP info next week!

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• Today, of course, is the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and I have several stories to share. First up: As I wrote about in this space a few years ago, the phrase “never forget” is gaining importance as Sept. 11, for more and more Americans, is history rather than a memory. A public affairs expert, writing for The Conversation, says: “For much of the past 25 years, each anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks has arrived with signs and stickers reminding people to ‘never forget.’ I have always felt unsure about what those words mean. For those of us who were alive in 2001, forgetting the day itself is almost impossible. I remember the shock and fear, the replays of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center, and the moment the second tower fell. I remember seeing on television the missing-person photographs that covered New York and the awful recognition that very few of those people were likely to be found alive. I remember the bravery of the New York firefighters and police. My college students have no such memories or feelings. Most were born years after Sept. 11, 2001. Memories of 9/11 are still vivid for many of us, but it’s just history for many of us, too. They encounter what happened through photographs, documentaries, memorials, classroom lessons and stories told by people who were alive on that day. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum estimates that about 100 million Americans have been born since the attacks. The shift is ordinary and still somehow startling. An event that once felt like it had split time into a permanent before and after is fading into history itself.”

• Second: My friend Darrell Tucci, who was in lower Manhattan during the attacks, wrote a beautiful piece headlined “Twenty-Five Years Later: What I Saw, and What He Lies About” on Substack. A snippet: “I will never, not for the rest of my life, forget what I saw next. People falling. People jumping. Metal and glass raining down. Cars colliding on the street beside us as drivers looked up instead of at the road. My colleague froze in place. I grabbed her, pulled her arm over my shoulder, and half-carried her back to our office building. We locked down for hours. As the real news broke—that this was a coordinated terrorist attack—we sat in a conference room, some of us praying, some crying, all of us just trying to understand what had happened to our city and our country. Eventually we knew we had to leave. Wrapped scarves and fabric around our faces because the air outside was thick with debris and dust. I made my way to an evacuation point on the East River. I climbed onto the front of a tugboat, sat down in my suit, covered head to toe in soot, and exhaled for what felt like the first time in hours. We landed in Hoboken. Triage teams met us at the dock. They hosed us down head to toe, soaked us through, and loaded us onto trains heading anywhere west. Anywhere away.”

• Third is something Darrell writes about later in his piece, and something you may have already heard about—what the president recently said about his experience on Sept. 11. It’s one of several conflicting tall tales he’s told about that day. NBC News reports: “At an event ahead of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, President Donald Trump told a story Tuesday in which he said two firefighters picked him up off the ground near the U.S. Steel Building close to ground zero ‘right after’ the terrorist attacks and whisked him away because they thought the building was going to collapse on them. ‘I’ll never forget two firemen, we thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big, strong guys. And I’m not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arm, said, “Got to get out of here,”’ Trump said, without specifying exactly when the incident occurred. ‘They literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up, and they started running with me. I said, “Fellas, I can run myself.” But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down,’ he added. Trump, who said in his remarks that he was ‘down there right after this happened,’ later said on Truth Social that he was not at the World Trade Center ‘on the same day as the collapse, but shortly thereafter.’”

• Here’s the latest in a series of more-than-occasional news stories about weather-related records: Congrats! You just lived through the country’s hottest summer on record. The Washington Post (gift link) reports: “The contiguous United States just experienced its warmest summer on record, according to data released Wednesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with sweltering conditions driven by nights—particularly in the West—that would not cool. The average temperature from June through August was 74.4 degrees Fahrenheit across the Lower 48 and the District of Columbia, surpassing by 0.4 degrees the previous record set during a notoriously sweltering Dust Bowl summer of 1936. The records date to 1895. One of this summer’s most consequential trends unfolded at night. NOAA’s latest data found that 2026 was the warmest summer on record for minimum temperatures, breaking a record set in 2021. And a Washington Post analysis found that 133 million people live in counties where one out of every four nights were extremely hot compared with the previous 45 years.”

• And finally … Trump’s trade war with Canada is getting stupid … figuratively and literally. CNN says: “What do pony fur, sequins, golf carts, bamboo furniture and mezcal have in common? Until Tuesday evening, not much. Now they’re among what could soon be unlikely casualties of President Donald Trump’s intensifying trade war with Canada. The Trump administration added those items, among dozens of others, to a list of goods that could be subject to 50% tariffs—or outright banned—later this month if they’re imported into the United States from Canada. The White House said the move was aimed both at Canada’s retaliatory tariffs, which took effect Tuesday, and what the administration calls Canada’s ‘discriminatory’ treatment of American goods. The new tariffs and import bans, it said on Tuesday, would help protect American workers, farmers and manufacturers from foreign competition. There’s just one small problem: The United States barely buys many of the products on that list from Canada. For example, Trump’s Canadian import bans apply to virtually all alcoholic beverages, including mezcal, a product Canada can’t legally produce domestically because of Mexican labeling rules.”

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