McClatchy Media Company’s recent round of layoffs will likely speed up the already rapid decline of Kentucky’s media landscape, journalists and journalism experts said. 

The journalists who remain at The Herald-Leader are now expected to produce the same quality journalism with roughly half the newsroom staff, according to former staffers. And laid-off journalists are worried about how the loss of reporters will impact communities, particularly more rural parts of the state without many alternative news sources. 

“We know that the math says that if you lose this many people who produce stories over a year’s time, that’s not replaceable,” said Benjy Hamm, director of the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. “Hundreds and hundreds of stories [will] go untold now because of this loss.” 

McClatchy laid off a total of 13 Herald-Leader staff–12 reporters and one editor–cutting the newsroom by 52 percent and eliminating entire beats, former Herald-Leader staffers said. Now, seven weeks before the November mid-term elections, the paper has two reporters in charge of covering Lexington city and state politics. And the paper lost its only Eastern Kentucky and environmental reporter. 

“The fact that our company has been losing money is no secret, but I think layoffs of this scale were surprising to most people involved,” said Alex Acquisto, an award-winning statewide enterprise reporter covering politics and public health for the Herald-Leader and union guild representative who was laid off last week. She spearheaded the newspaper’s coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic before turning to the effects of climate disasters as well as the impacts of Kentucky’ s near-total abortion ban and transgender care bans. 

And it’s not just the Lexington Herald-Leader – the media company laid off more than 90 employees across 13 newspapers in eight states last week, including The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee, The Kansas City Star, and The Lexington Herald-Leader, Kentucky’s second-largest newspaper. 

The newspaper giant has gotten rid of staff and entire newspapers in recent years and has been plagued by debt and declining print revenue, even filing for bankruptcy in 2020. That same year, the formerly family-owned business was sold to the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management. In 2025, the company closed its Washington, D.C. bureau and sold two of its Georgia papers, The Macon Telegraph and The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, to the state subsidiary of the National Trust for Local News this past July.  

Kentucky’s rural press is shrinking with several areas considered news deserts. There are six counties in the Bluegrass state without a single news source and 88 with only one, according to a 2025 report from The State of Local News Project from Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative. 

Many small towns in Kentucky, including in Eastern Kentucky, have their own daily newspapers that publish an issue at least once a week, like Whitesburg’s The Mountain Eagle and Louisa’s The Levisa Laser.

But as community newspapers struggled to stay afloat, many of Kentucky’s  small communities looked to The Herald-Leader for statewide news and their deep politics coverage to stay informed,, journalism experts said. 

The daily newspaper’s only reporter based in Eastern Kentucky, Austin R. Ramsey, was one of the staffers impacted by the layoffs. 

Acquisto argued that while the layoffs will ultimately hurt the news landscape of Fayette County, the cuts will be more severely felt in rural communities. “That isn’t to say that those communities still won’t look to the Herald-Leader for information, but the type of content that we give them is greatly impacted.” 

Jennifer Brown, publisher, editor, and co-founder of the Hopkinsville digital news outlet The Hoptown Chronicle, said that she has relied on The Herald-Leader as a primary source for state political news for years. Most of the region’s available television news comes from stations based in Nashville, she said. 

“Many people here are more informed about what’s going on in the Tennessee state government than they are [about] Kentucky,” she said, adding that she is a long-time subscriber to The Lexington Herald-Leader. 

Brown worries that the layoffs will impact the newsroom’s institutional knowledge  of communities and issues that its reporters have covered for years on their respective beats. .

Hamm, the director of the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues said though, that the full picture of how the newspaper’s layoffs will impact its coverage is still unclear. But he argued that the cuts would mean fewer watchdog reporters  and less reliable information about how elected officials across the state are doing their jobs. 

“There is no gain from cutting half your staff that’s beneficial for readership or the community,” Hamm said. 

A spokesperson for McClatchy has yet to respond to a request for comment from Queer Kentucky.