Every reporter, editor and translator at El Nuevo Herald left McClatchy’s payroll this week, part of a newsroom reduction that also tore through the Miami Herald’s English-language staff. The cuts landed on Thursday, September 10, and by the next morning South Florida’s paper of record had lost close to a third of its editorial team, according to accounts from outlets that covered the layoffs as they unfolded, including Editor & Publisher and the Associated Press.
How Big Were the Miami Cuts, Really?
The AP reported that Miami Herald Media Company shed 32 positions in total — 28 people let go outright, plus four vacant roles frozen rather than filled — figures that, per the wire service, came directly from Herald deputy investigations editor Carol Marbin Miller. Florida Politics and Miami New Times instead describe a flat “more than 30” roles cut from the Herald’s English-language side, treating El Nuevo Herald’s wipeout as a separate line item rather than folding it into that figure. A Spanish-language outlet, CubaHeadlines, breaks the same 32 down differently still: 25 layoffs on the Herald’s English desk and seven from El Nuevo Herald.
Who Actually Lost Their Jobs
On the English-language side, a deputy sports editor, a sportswriter, a city hall reporter and a photographer were among those cut. CubaHeadlines separately identified a sports commentator, a culture writer, an editor and a translator as part of El Nuevo Herald’s departed staff — and reported, in a detail not confirmed elsewhere, that a Cuba reporter and Venezuela-focused reporter kept their positions.
Miami now has no reporter dedicated to City Hall, no Miami Beach beat, no political reporter and — per the NewsGuild-CWA — nobody left covering Broward County at all. The same union notice says the Herald lost its only female photographer, its entire audience team and its sole video producer in the same round.
An AI Fight That Set the Stage
The layoffs followed months of tension over artificial intelligence. Addressing staff in May, chief executive Tony Hunter described a corporate goal to “agentify the entire enterprise.” Weeks earlier, more than 65 employees across the Herald newsroom and its Bradenton sister paper had already put their names on a letter objecting to having AI rewrite their work under their own bylines without permission, and unionized staff at five papers spanning Washington state and Idaho staged a one-day picket demanding higher wages and limits on the technology.
Deputy investigations editor Carol Marbin Miller, whose own job survived the round, warned on social media that Miami is on the precipice of becoming a news desert. Former El Nuevo Herald writer Wilfredo Cancio Isla put it more starkly on Facebook, calling the cuts the prelude to the demise for two journalistic operations.
A Newsroom Nearly 50 Years in the Making, Gone in a Day
El Nuevo Herald launched in 1977 and today ranks as the nation’s No. 2 outlet for Spanish-language journalism by audience reach, according to Report for America, with a print run above 357,000 copies and roughly 3.9 million monthly online visitors spread across South Florida, the Caribbean and Latin America. Its home turf, Miami-Dade County, counts Hispanic or Latino residents as 70.6 percent of its population, according to U.S. Census Bureau data — making it one of the most heavily Latino large counties in the country to lose a dedicated Spanish-language newsroom overnight.
Who’s Left to Cover Latino Miami Now?
Diario Las Américas, Miami’s other long-running Spanish-language daily, along with broadcasters Telemundo 51 and Univision 23, still operate in the market, but none run a bilingual print-and-digital operation at the scale El Nuevo Herald once did. NPR affiliate WLRN, which has shared office space with El Nuevo Herald’s staff for years, may be the closest remaining institutional partner, though its own newsroom is a fraction of the size. Reporter Alex Harris started a crowdfunding page to help cover living expenses for 23 colleagues shown the door across all three affected papers…