Robin Epley, a former opinion columnist with The Sacramento Bee, was a 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist along with other journalists at The Chico Enterprise Record for the newsroom’s coverage of the 2018 Camp Fire.
Opinion journalism is not what you might imagine it to be. It isn’t just a bunch of people in a conference room, easily spouting off hot takes and garnering anger online just for the fun of it.
The basis of good opinion journalism is good journalism. Those of us who practice it do the hard work of reporting, then turn around and ask you to consider what it truly means for you and your community. We want our readers to think about the day’s news — and its consequences — on a deeper level.
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As an opinion columnist and editorial board member for The Sacramento Bee since 2021, I knew not everyone agreed with my opinions, but I believed the slings and arrows were worth it to bring a different viewpoint to those who gave me their time and attention. My job required not only chasing down all sides of a story, but also drawing on my well of institutional knowledge to articulate a coherent, fact-based opinion. It was the decades I spent as a community journalist in Northern California that ultimately made me a good columnist.
I’ve been lucky to have had nearly 20 years in journalism, the last five of which were in opinion at The Bee, my hometown paper. I watched endlessly as colleagues across the country lost their jobs at the whim of faceless hedge-fund managers and prominent billionaires. Somehow, I’d always managed to dodge the axe.
But on Thursday, it was my turn.
Bee owner McClatchy Media, bought out of bankruptcy in 2020 by hedge fund Chatham Asset Management, executed its most brutal round of layoffs in years that morning. I was notified to join a meeting with my editor and human resources with just two minutes’ notice, poorly stifling tears as the HR representative told me, “Good news, your last paycheck will be a little bigger because you won’t be paying for medical coverage out of it.”
The unions representing McClatchy workers reported that about 90 journalists across at least 13 newsrooms nationally, including at least a dozen at The Bee, were laid off. Among them are every member of the editorial boards at McClatchy’s California papers — in Sacramento, Modesto, Fresno, San Luis Obispo and Merced.
Mariel Garza
At the height of The Bee’s board in 2023, there were eight of us, including two Pulitzer Prize winners, a columnist who had worked for the paper for 24 years and another who had worked for The Fresno Bee for nearly 50. We were women and men, young and old; we leaned left and right, and everyone brought both experience and a passion for our communities to the board. The only one left now is our former editor, but I’m not sure who is left for him to edit.
These layoffs came just as our board was wrapping up weeks of grueling endorsement interviews, with everyone from school board candidates to gubernatorial candidates. We record and show these interviews online, garnering tens of thousands of views for the company across all of its platforms. We do these interviews because we strongly believe that those running for public office should answer to the public.
But I don’t know if our endorsements will run the way we wrote them. Will they ever see publication? Will Chatham change our board’s final choices on the propositions? I wish I could trust that our work will stand.
During my five years on The Bee’s editorial board, I pushed hard to make sure we had endorsements not just for the top-of-the-ballot races that drew the most attention, but every local city council election, every city measure and every local school bond and board race. We met with hundreds of candidates and campaigners; office seekers in smaller cities that had gone for years without notice often thanked us for our coverage.
Mariel Garza
This isn’t about just a few columnists losing their jobs: The Bee, the newspaper of record for the capital of California, maintained an editorial board independent from the newsroom since the paper's founding in February 1857. Offering commentary and provoking thought are true community services, disappeared by a hedge-fund company that has shown it doesn’t care about Sacramento — or Miami, Kansas City, Raleigh or any other city whose McClatchy newspaper suffered similarly deep cuts as The Bee last week.
I want to be clear: There are still incredible journalists at The Sacramento Bee doing excellent work. But robust opinion journalism is an important way to hold the government accountable to the people. The shedding of jobs across the country for columnists, editorial writers and others who keep experienced eyes on their communities is making the nation a worse place at a time when Americans can ill-afford it.
I now join thousands of other journalists in wildly ringing the alarm bells. There is simply no hope for the future of American journalism if we don’t wrest control away from private-equity and hedge-fund newspaper profiteers, and give it back to the people who truly care about our communities: the journalists who go out every day to find out what’s happening behind closed doors, and then ask you to consider what it all means.
I was honored to be one of them, for as long as I could.
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