McClatchy cut unionized journalists at The News Tribune on Thursday, Sept. 10, reducing the staff at Tacoma's daily newspaper by one-third of its union workforce.

The exact Tacoma count is in dispute. The Pacific Northwest News Guild told The Seattle Times that seven unionized employees were laid off at The News Tribune.

A separate national statement from The NewsGuild-CWA said four Washington newsrooms lost seven reporters total, with five in Tacoma.

Either way, the losses are steep. The NewsGuild-CWA said Tacoma will no longer have a single dedicated journalist covering city hall, Pierce County government or local schools. The guild said the growing suburbs and rural communities around the city would lose coverage entirely.

The cuts hit hard across the region. McClatchy also laid off unionized employees at The Olympian, The Bellingham Herald and The Tri-City Herald, plus 10 at The Idaho Statesman, according to The Seattle Times.

Nationwide, more than 90 journalists lost their jobs across at least 13 McClatchy papers in eight states, Poynter reported. Several people told Poynter it was the chain's most severe round of layoffs in more than seven years.

An internal memo from Greg Farmer, McClatchy's executive vice president of local news, cited a 41% drop in consumer revenue over five years while expenses stayed flat. The memo, obtained by The New York Times, said the company could not keep investing where subscriber interest did not support the cost.

The NewsGuild-CWA described the Tacoma losses in specific terms. Among those cut was a two-time Washington sports reporter of the year who had spent decades at McClatchy. An award-winning investigative reporter who had exposed how city policy failures contributed to violence on a street police nicknamed "Tacoma's deadliest" was also let go. No names of the laid-off journalists appeared in any public statement.

NewsGuild President Jon Schleuss pushed back on McClatchy's rationale on X, as reported by TheWrap. "You can't pivot to AI, cut 40% of your local journalists and write 'we remain deeply committed to local journalism,'" Schleuss wrote. "You're lying."

The layoffs came months after McClatchy developed an AI editorial tool that could generate articles based on reporters' work, according to TheWrap. That tool drew pushback from unionized journalists at several newsrooms.

McClatchy, which owns 30 newspapers in 14 states, was a family-run business for 163 years before declaring bankruptcy. Chatham Asset Management, a New Jersey hedge fund, bought the chain for $312 million in 2020. McClatchy did not respond to media requests for comment as of Sept. 11, The Seattle Times reported. No timeline for restructuring The News Tribune's remaining staff has been announced.