This has been a long time coming. In the mid aughts I worked at the Sacramento Bee, which is also the HQ for McClatchy Corporate. Every financial quarter the CEO would go into the newsroom and break the news of how print ad revenue was falling, but digital ads were looking promising, with double digit percentage increases, and that someday soon would make up the shortfall (most everyone in the industry knew, without knowing the denominators, how unlikely that was).<p>What really screwed McClatchy over was that in 2006, it bought Knight-Ridder – then the 2nd biggest chain – for $4.5 billion [0]. Historically speaking, it wasn't the worst deal on the face of it. But in retrospect, McClatchy bought when the price was highest, though it managed to quickly sell off a dozen papers shortly after for not terrible prices [1].<p>So along with the declining ad revenue, the CEO would also talk about the massive debt he had just acquired, and the amount of interest we were paying each quarter, but how, once this "secular downturn" got stabilized, the new acquisitions would start paying for themselves. I left the Bee before the first big layoffs hit, but I remember people being mostly "whatever" at the time and putting it out of sight and out of mind. As a regular rank-and-file person, not much you can do or fuss about when the CEO is making billion dollar deals.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5260417" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=526041...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/business/media/mcclatchy-sells-5-papers-bought-from-knight-ridder.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/business/media/mcclatchy-...</a>