COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 30/06/2020
Jon Allsop, CJR
IN FEBRUARY, McClatchy, the newspaper chain that owns titles including the Miami Herald and the Charlotte Observer, filed for bankruptcy in the Southern District of New York. As bankruptcy proceedings have unspooled since then, a lot has changed—both in the world at large and for the already-beleaguered news business, which has been hammered by collapsing ad revenue amid the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic. In April, McClatchy furloughed more than a hundred non-editorial staffers and cut executive positions and pay; around the same time, the company asked the judge overseeing the bankruptcy to allow McClatchy to scale back its payments to its lawyers and creditors. McClatchy’s Kevin G. Hall reported at the time that “the case now has one of the largest investigation budgets in the history of the Southern District’s bankruptcy court.”