Sacramento Bee slashes staff as Gov. Gavin Newsom weighs state aid for news outlets

When I and this column moved from the Sacramento Union to the Sacramento Bee 42 years ago, it was something of a culture shock.

The two newspapers had been cross-town rivals ever since both were founded, just a few years after the discovery of gold and California’s admission as a state.

The Bee, still owned by the founding McClatchy family, was clearly winning the competition in the late 20^th century, but the game changed in 1966 when San Diego-based Copley Newspapers acquired the Union and declared a battle for dominance in the state capital.

It was as much a political maneuver as a financial one. The Bee’s editorial page had long been a supporter of liberal policies while Copley was solidly conservative.

The Union’s new owner, Jim Copley, clearly wanted to bolster Republicans in the Capitol, particularly Ronald Reagan, whose election as governor was virtually simultaneous with Copley’s purchase.

An old-fashioned newspaper war raged for the next few decades, especially in the coverage of politics, Sacramento’s economic mainstay.

Cultures of the rivals were part of the conflict. The Bee was stodgy, dutifully but superficially covering politics and local stories, while the Union was feisty, specializing in investigations of political figures.

The Bee became more aggressive when Gregory Favre became its editor in 1984, beefing up its staff of journalists and winning several Pulitzer Prizes. I was one of his first hires and for the next 33 years wrote this column for the Bee.

At the time, the Bee and other American newspapers were making a lot of money by dominating local retail advertising and classified ads. However, the advent of the internet in the 1990s revolutionized the retail business and how it was advertised and virtually erased classified ads. Thus began the decline of the newspaper industry.

The Sacramento Union was one casualty. Beset by advertising declines, a scandal in reporting its circulation figures and ownership and managerial turmoil, the Union closed its doors in 1994. The Bee survived its 144-year battle with the Union but could not escape what was happening to the entire industry. McClatchy declared bankruptcy in 2020.

As California’s newspapers shrank or vanished, the toll on coverage of politics and the state Capitol was heavy. At one time almost every daily newspaper in the state had at least one reporter covering the Capitol, watching local legislators and legislation having local impacts.

One by one, those bureaus and their watchdogs vanished, leaving only a handful of newspaper reporters covering politics of the nation’s most populous and economically important state. However, some non-profit organizations have arisen to fill the vacuum, most prominently CalMatters, whose founders believed the decline of political coverage was dangerous.

I left the Bee in 2017 to join CalMatters, then just 2 years old. I saw what was happening to the Bee and other papers as they desperately tried to survive by cutting staff and how political coverage was declining. I believed Californians still wanted to know what was happening in the Capitol and saw CalMatters and other startups as potential saviors. So far it has succeeded, growing exponentially as newspapers were cutting back.

This foray into newspaper history is sparked by an announcement last week that Chatham Asset Management, the company that assumed ownership of the McClatchy chain in bankruptcy, is making very deep staff cuts at the Bee and its other papers.

It’s another sad episode in the decline of a once-great newspaper that traces its origins to the Gold Rush. Ironically, it occurs as Gov. Gavin Newsom decides whether to sign or veto legislation that would give California news organizations some refundable tax credits for maintaining their reportorial staffs.