McClatchy laid off 12 journalists at the Lexington Herald-Leader on Thursday, Sept. 10, a cut that Kentucky Public Radio reported leaves the paper with two reporters to cover Lexington city government and state government combined.

The 12 include seven news reporters, three sports reporters, two visual journalists and one editor, according to Kentucky Public Radio, which reported the cuts eliminated a majority of the newsroom's positions. The layoffs take effect in two weeks.

Among those let go: Adrian Paul Bryant, who covered Lexington city hall; Alex Acquisto, a health and politics reporter who served as the newsroom's union representative; and Jared Peck, who covered high school sports.

“12 layoffs at the Herald-Leader today, including myself,” Bryant wrote on Bluesky at 11:44 a.m. Thursday. “All I've wanted to do since moving to Lexington is serve the city well.”

McClatchy told staff in an email that it is “reshaping its newsroom structure to more closely align resources with changing subscriber interests and the ways audiences engage with local news,” according to Kentucky Public Radio, which said Acquisto shared the email. A McClatchy spokesperson and Herald-Leader Executive Editor Jeremy Chisenhall did not respond to the radio network's requests for comment. The Lexington Times emailed questions to McClatchy's media relations office and to Chisenhall on Thursday afternoon. Neither immediately responded. This story will be updated if they do.

What is left

The Herald-Leader is Lexington's daily newspaper. Its reporters cover the Urban County Council, the mayor's office, Fayette County Public Schools, the University of Kentucky, the General Assembly in Frankfort and UK athletics.

Bryant, a former staffer at the civic-education nonprofit CivicLex, was the paper's dedicated city government reporter. Acquisto had been at the paper for seven years and was its lead reporter on health care and Kentucky politics.

Kentucky Public Radio's count of two remaining city and state government reporters could not be independently confirmed by the Times. A Report for America profile of the paper, which carries no date, lists a newsroom of 44 journalists. The paper's social media accounts kept publishing Thursday, including a story on Fayette County schools Superintendent Demetrus Liggins' retirement records and a preview of Saturday's Kentucky-Alabama football game.

“Journalism at its best holds power to account, sheds light on corruption, and equips us with necessary information to make the most informed decisions in our communities,” Acquisto told Kentucky Public Radio. She called the cuts a loss “that impacts Kentucky more broadly.”

Who owns the paper

McClatchy is owned by Chatham Asset Management, a New Jersey hedge fund. Chatham bought the chain out of bankruptcy in 2020. McClatchy had filed for Chapter 11 protection on Feb. 13, 2020, weighed down by debt from its 2006 purchase of Knight Ridder, the deal that brought the Herald-Leader into the company. A federal bankruptcy judge approved the $312 million sale to Chatham on Aug. 4, 2020.

Thursday's layoffs were not limited to Lexington. Kentucky Public Radio reported that McClatchy began announcing cuts at papers across the country Thursday morning, with early reports of layoffs at the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star and the Charlotte Observer. McClatchy had already eliminated its national breaking-news desk in November 2025, according to the media newsletter Status.

Chisenhall, 27, took over the Herald-Leader on Jan. 26. He had been a breaking news reporter and editor at the paper from 2020 to early 2024, then ran McClatchy's two Georgia papers. He replaced Rick Green, who left in November 2025 to become a publisher in Iowa.

The AI fight

The layoffs land in the middle of a dispute between McClatchy and its unionized newsrooms over artificial intelligence. Since early this year the company has pushed a tool it calls the Content Scaling Agent, which rewrites reporters' stories into summaries, explainers and video scripts aimed at different audiences. TheWrap reported in April that the tool runs on Anthropic's Claude and that unions at the Miami Herald, the Sacramento Bee and the Kansas City Star filed grievances over it.

Reporters at several McClatchy papers began withholding their bylines from AI-rewritten stories in May. Journalists at four McClatchy papers in Washington state and the Idaho Statesman held a one-day strike on May 26 over pay and AI protections.

The Herald-Leader's newsroom is represented by the Lexington Newspaper Guild, a unit of the NewsGuild-CWA. The Times found no public statement from the guild as of Thursday afternoon.

A long shrink

The Herald-Leader has been losing pieces for a decade. Printing moved to Louisville in 2016, eliminating 25 full-time and four part-time jobs, and then out of state in 2021. The paper sold its landmark building at 100 Midland Ave. to Fayette County Public Schools in 2020 and moved to smaller offices on Loudon Avenue. Since August 2024 it has printed a paper edition only three days a week, on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.

The paper's lineage runs to 1870. The Lexington Herald and the Lexington Leader merged in 1983 under Knight Ridder, which had bought both papers in 1973. The Herald-Leader has won three Pulitzer Prizes: for investigative reporting in 1986, for its series on cash payments to University of Kentucky basketball players; for editorial writing in 1992; and for editorial cartooning in 2000.

The Lexington Times is an independent Lexington news outlet. It competes with the Herald-Leader for readers and has cited the paper's reporting in its own work.