Newsletter 9/14: McClatchy’s biggest misstep

Good morning! Today is Monday, September 14, 2026. You’re reading The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with local business-y news and insights for Charlotte, N.C.

Today's Charlotte Ledger is sponsored by Carnegie Private Wealth. At Carnegie Private Wealth, we bring clarity to complexity. Through thoughtful planning and personal attention, we help you pursue opportunities and reclaim time for what matters most.

Good morning! It’s Tony. Is local journalism a bad business — one destined for perpetual decline? Or do poor decisions of media executives play a role? We’re taking a closer look at those questions today, in light of the news that McClatchy, the parent company of The Charlotte Observer, laid off one-quarter of the Observer’s newsroom last week. Having fewer journalists in Charlotte means we’ll know less about our city, with fewer people watching and asking questions of powerful institutions. (As someone who has spent nearly 30 years as a journalist in Charlotte, I have opinions on this issue!) Let’s take a closer look at how McClatchy and the Observer wound up where they are, and whether the official explanation matches reality. Also, the latest on school board drama, the Morrison Family YMCA sale and more.

By Tony Mecia

In February 2015, it was the issue that had all of America talking: What color is the dress? Is it white and gold? Or blue and black?

The BuzzFeed article on the dress – which could be seen in one of two different ways – became one of that publication’s most-read articles of all time. BuzzFeed built large audiences through viral hits it would post on Facebook, like putting rubber bands around watermelons until they exploded, or quizzes such as “Which ‘Friends’ character are you?”

Investors, including NBCUniversal, poured in hundreds of millions of dollars. Disney considered buying it. BuzzFeed appeared to be the future of media, with a proven ability to attract readers on the internet.

But within a few years, BuzzFeed was missing revenue targets. It soon realized that huge web traffic didn’t translate into huge revenue.

Despite creating a news division that hired first-rate journalists and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize – for exposing secret detention camps in China – it started layoffs and is now a shell of itself. Since its peak in 2016, BuzzFeed has cut about 80% of its staff and lost about 95% of its value.

The parable of BuzzFeed came to mind last week, on the news that McClatchy, the California-based parent company of The Charlotte Observer and more than two dozen other local news operations, is cutting at least 90 positions, including at least eight in Charlotte. The cuts eliminate about one-quarter of the Observer’s newsroom, reducing it to around 25 — down from nearly 300 at its peak about 20 years ago.

It’s the latest disheartening cut in local media, following the closures of Charlotte magazine and Queen City Nerve. With each cutback, Charlotte has fewer people dedicated to providing credible information and helping the public understand our community.

McClatchy chalked up its most recent bloodbath to the failure of the public to appreciate its investments in local reporters over the past five years. A company memo to employees said: “We believed continued investment in our journalism would strengthen our relationship with subscribers and our business. We measured the results. Consumer revenue declined 41% while local news expenses remained largely flat. The results are clear and require us to make a different choice.”

It’s unclear where the company goes from here, but some signs point to more social media influencers. The Observer created the role of a “food insider” this year, who shares experiences eating country fried steaks and ceviche in Instagram videos. And McClatchy’s website posted new positions last month for “College Sports Personality/Influencer” and “Saltwater South Personality/Influencer,” described as a “digital lifestyle brand celebrating the unique spirit of the Gulf Coast, Carolinas and Florida.” The pay for each is listed at up to $106,000 a year, which is more than the salaries of most McClatchy reporters.

This has become a recurring talking point in the media industry – that the public doesn’t care much anymore about substantive journalism and prefers its influencers and cat videos, so what can you do besides get in on those trends?

That narrative conveniently also lets McClatchy’s management off the hook for bungling its transition away from print newspapers. For the past decade, as it became clear that the BuzzFeed clicks-at-all-costs strategy was a failed business model, McClatchy persisted in following it. Sadly, we’re now seeing the results, and Charlotte’s once-dominant media company is now substantially smaller.

The idea that clicks are meaningful in some way endures among many journalists and much of the public. Can you make money from clicks? The answer, in the words of mid-2010s headlines, might surprise you: They’re worth only pennies in advertising.

To make money off clicks requires huge scale, which is difficult for local publishers to achieve, even in a fast-growing region like Charlotte. And it forces you to always be looking for the next “What color is the dress?” viral article – and to write about inflammatory topics, news of the weird and half-baked headlines that exploit what is known as the “curiosity gap.”

How else to explain …

At a conference in 2018, BuzzFeed News editor Ben Smith said: “People often, in digital media, take traffic as a proxy for success and revenue, which is obviously false.” Eight years ago, in other words, the editor of BuzzFeed was publicly acknowledging the flaw in making web traffic the North Star. Today, that view is widely accepted in the news industry.

During that time, though, McClatchy continued using web traffic as a proxy for success and revenue. In a 2021 article in The Assembly, a top McClatchy editor in North Carolina continually cited the number of unique web visitors per month as evidence of its publications’ size and influence. Over the weekend, one of the laid-off staffers wrote on Reddit: “They literally asked us to ‘create content’ that gets clicks instead of journalism.”

An old adage in business, often attributed to management guru Peter Drucker, is “what gets measured gets managed” – that is, once you adopt a performance metric, people start changing their behavior to score well on that metric. The Observer and other McClatchy publications have struggled to move beyond that mindset.

Several former Observer reporters have told me that editors stopped them from writing what they considered important articles because they were not predicted to get enough clicks. They had yearly pageview goals. Their articles were evaluated based on the number of views they received. The message got through, and the idea still endures, though I’m told articles are now evaluated on a broader and more sensible range of measures.

McClatchy’s inability to wean itself from a click-first mentality also created two different versions of how The Observer is perceived. Local reporters and editors view themselves as doing the unglamorous but important work of watching school board meetings and holding power to account. But the public sees social media feeds and an unwieldy website filled mostly with irrelevant information that seems aimed at a national audience. The important civic journalism that Observer staffers pride themselves on gets drowned out by the McClatchy-driven coverage of celebrity nip slips.

A lot of people fondly recall the days of strong local newspapers. It’s unclear that anyone today, though, is enamored of the odd mash-up of local journalism and national clickbait that McClatchy has engineered and served up on nearly unreadable websites. That is more likely to be the reason why revenues plunged 41%, not the overhiring of investigative reporters.

McClatchy has made plenty of other missteps, too: eliminating local ad salespeople, embracing artificial intelligence for writing in a time of deep public skepticism, providing impenetrable customer service, devising complex and ever-changing pricing, promoting relentless discounts and squandering The Observer’s good brand name and market dominance.

In its 2020 bankruptcy, McClatchy was bought by hedge fund Chatham Asset Management. It ceased being a public company, so we don’t know its finances. But it’s a fair question to ask whether the hedge fund’s turnaround specialist, an accountant and newspaper executive named Tony Hunter, has achieved much of a turnaround in his six years as CEO.

While McClatchy says it tried its best and failed, there are plenty of places in which local publications seem to be navigating the choppy media waters far better. Publications in Baltimore, Memphis and Charleston, S.C., are growing by moving away from outdated measures of success. “We are not doing SEO keyword stories,” the editorial director of the Daily Memphian said last year.

Although none of those publications is likely to achieve the size and influence local newspapers once had, they appear to be achieving what The Charlotte Observer hasn’t, with bigger staffs and more paying digital subscribers – despite being in smaller cities. The Daily Memphian is in a metro area half the size of Charlotte’s and employs 60% more journalists. The Post and Courier in Charleston, in a metro area 70% smaller than Charlotte, employs four times as many journalists and has expanded statewide.

These publications have invested in technology and are growing through a mix of paid subscriptions, advertising, events and charitable gifts. The idea seems to be to create a product good enough to pay for, to build audiences that advertisers want to reach and to be so vital to the community to attract donations. Critically, unlike The Charlotte Observer, all of those publications are locally controlled and have benefited from major financial support from local philanthropists and business leaders.

In 2004, when I was a business reporter at The Charlotte Observer, I wrote part of a series examining the demise of the North Carolina textile industry. We explored the collapse of Pillowtex, the former Fieldcrest Cannon mill in Kannapolis, which was once the country’s largest producer of sheets and towels.

The industry blamed globalization for its problems. Those issues were real. But our series found that individual decisions made by company executives also contributed.

When the world changes, executives aren’t powerless to respond. They make decisions that shape the lives of their workers and their communities.

Like the BuzzFeed dress, McClatchy’s executives saw one version of reality.

They got it spectacularly wrong.

Tony Mecia is The Ledger’s executive editor. He was a reporter and editor at The Charlotte Observer from 1998 to 2009. Reach him at [email protected].

Related Ledger article:

Today’s supporting sponsor is Landon A. Dunn, attorney-at-law in Matthews:

The drama over the leadership of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools seems to be continuing, with the focus shifting away from the superintendent to the CMS board chair.

Following this summer’s unusual placement of Superintendent Crystal Hill on paid leave followed by her reinstatement in August – after an outside investigation that cost at least $379,000 — three CMS board members have sent a letter suggesting that the board replace chair Stephanie Sneed.

Board members Cynthia Stone, Lenora Shipp and Monty Witherspoon said they would like to discuss the matter at the school board’s next meeting on Sept. 22.

“The members stated that they no longer feel comfortable with the current leadership and that a change must be made to preserve the reputation of both the board and the district,” WBTV reported.

The specifics of the dissatisfaction with Sneed have not emerged.

Several Sneed allies defended her publicly.

“For people to come back and say these things is just not team-like, undemocratic, and I am really saddened by the fact that people are acting like this,” board member Shamaiye Haynes told WBTV.

A majority of the nine-member board can replace the board chair at any time, though it usually selects a chair each year in December.

The matter will be placed on the board’s agenda, Sneed said in an email obtained by WBT News’ Brett Jensen. In the email, Sneed added: “I am formally asserting that I have been subjected to unlawful targeting, bullying, discrimination, harassment and retaliation in connection with my service on the Board. I reserve all rights and remedies available to me.”

The dust-up follows a cryptic commentary by Sneed at the conclusion of last week’s school board meeting, in which she read a statement about what she called a “threat to public education we don’t talk about enough.”

She said:

 CMS board meetings tend to be snooze-fests, but the one on Sept. 22 might be worth tuning into. –Tony Mecia

A group of Charlotte business and civic leaders have signed a letter in support of the YMCA of Greater Charlotte’s planned sale of the Morrison Family YMCA in Ballantyne.

The sale to Moments of Hope Church, announced in June, has generated opposition in Ballantyne, with community members saying the closure of the Y next summer will deprive the area of an important gathering spot. A group has formed to try to undo the proposed sale and has held rallies at the Morrison Y.

The YMCA released a statement last week providing further details about the thinking behind the sale. It said lingering post-Covid financial challenges made the unsolicited $42.5M offer too good to reject.

In a separate letter released to The Ledger on Sunday, a group of 16 longtime business and civic leaders said they backed the YMCA’s decision. Somer are former YMCA board members.

They wrote:

Signers included former mayors Harvey Gantt and Richard Vinroot, former Queens University of Charlotte president Pamela Davies, former Harris Teeter president Fred Morganthall, former Bank of America executives Charles Bowman and Richard “Stick” Williams and former Charlotte Pipe and Foundry CEO Frank Dowd IV.

Notable opponents of the sale include Cameron Morrison, the grandson of the Morrison YMCA’s namesake. –Tony Mecia

➡️ Read the full letter

The compensation of Atrium Health’s top executives rose by an average of 21% in 2025, according to newly released records.

The executive compensation report from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Hospital Authority, which does business as Atrium Health, lists 11 executives who earned annual compensation ranging from $906,000 to $5.2M. 

Atrium released the report last week in response to an Aug. 20 request from The Ledger/NC Health News.

The report did not include the pay of Gene Woods, CEO of Atrium parent Advocate Health, or other top Advocate executives.

Last year was the first time Atrium excluded Woods from the report, saying he was not included because he is an Advocate Health executive rather than an executive of the hospital authority. That means his pay will not become public until Advocate files its 990 tax form, which typically happens in November.

Woods earned $25.8M in 2024, a 49% increase from the year before, according to the Advocate tax filing released last November.

Atrium has previously said that competitive compensation is necessary to recruit and retain top leaders capable of running increasingly complex hospital systems. —Michelle Crouch, co-published with N.C. Health News

➡ Read the full article with details on the highest-paid Atrium executives

Before Jim Rash became an Oscar-winning screenwriter — who’s also up for an Emmy tonight for his film “Miss You, Love You” — he was Snoopy at Charlotte Latin School. 

Rash, a Charlotte native, played the title role in “Snoopy: The Musical” at Charlotte Latin. Years later, he told arts critic Lawrence Toppman in an interview for The Charlotte Observer that he was “the worst Snoopy possible.” Rash also acted as a child in plays at Camp Thunderbird, a YMCA camp at Lake Wylie, Toppman reported. 

But Rash’s stepmother remembers it a little differently. 

“I think that was the first time we realized that he really had a flair for acting,” Betty Chafin Rash told The Ledger in an interview last week. (Chafin Rash has Charlotte roots herself. She was first elected to Charlotte City Council in 1975, is the third woman to have served on the council and is the first woman mayor pro tem.)

After the performance, she recalled, children in the audience — some dressed in their pajamas — lined up to get Snoopy’s autograph. 

Rash did an extra year of schooling at The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey before getting in and graduating from Chapel Hill. He then headed to Los Angeles, joined the improv and sketch comedy troupe The Groundlings, and built an acting career, most commonly known for his role as Dean Craig Pelton in the NBC sitcom “Community.”

In 2012, Rash won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for “The Descendants” alongside Nat Faxon and Alexander Payne. In 2013, he co-wrote, directed and starred in the coming-of-age comedy “The Way Way Back,” featuring Steve Carell, which received Critics' Choice nominations. 

Now, his HBO film “Miss You, Love You,” which he wrote and directed, is nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Television Movie. The film stars Allison Janney as a widow preparing for her husband’s funeral and Andrew Rannells as the assistant sent by her estranged son to help her.

The story has roots in Rash’s own family and the death of his father and Betty’s husband, who had Parkinson’s disease. Rash has said he drew from his experience surrounding his father’s funeral and his sister, Mebane, CEO of EdNC, who brought her assistant with her to help organize the funeral. Betty says that’s the extent of the film’s similarities to real events.

Betty was with Jim and Mebane in Chautauqua, N.Y., when he learned the news about his Emmy nomination. (Betty spends her summers in Chautauqua, a town and lake resort community in southwestern New York, and Jim and Mebane were visiting.) 

“You can imagine a picture of the three of us,” she recalled. “Well, particularly Mebane and I, jumping up and down, and the cute smile on his face, and you know it's kind of like a dream come true.”

She’ll watch the Emmys tonight from her home in Charlotte with friends. 

“I'm so proud of him,” she said. “I wish his dad were still alive to see all these wonderful things that have happened to him.” –Lindsey Banks

Events submitted by readers to The Ledger’s events board:

SEPTEMBER 29: “The Forum Featuring Vijay Gupta,” 6:30-8 p.m., at ImaginOn: The Joe & Joan Martin Center, 300 E. 7th St. Join The Charlotte Center for an unforgettable evening with Vijay Gupta—MacArthur Fellow, acclaimed violinist, author of Restrung and founder of Street Symphony. Through conversation and live music, Gupta explores the transformative power of creativity, connection, resilience and our shared humanity. $40/ticket.

SEPTEMBER 30: “A Discussion with Merrill Eisenhower,” 7-8:30 p.m., at Knight Theater, 430 S. Tryon St. Join the Stan Greenspon Holocaust Education Center at the Knight Theater for an evening with Merrill Eisenhower, great-grandson of President Eisenhower, as he reflects on Eisenhower’s role documenting the Holocaust and preserving its history. Learn how the Greenspon Center is carrying forward his legacy of service, remembrance and education. $36-$90.

OCTOBER 9: “Murder, Music & Caravaggio,” 7-8:30 p.m., at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, 115 W. 7th St. Experience Caravaggio’s dramatic world through a theatrical pastiche opera featuring music by Bach, Stradella, Monteverdi and other Baroque composers. Featuring soprano Laura Bohn, theorbo player John Lenti and ensemble, this immersive production brings Caravaggio’s art and turbulent life to life through music, theater and movement. Each concert with 7th Street celebrates the Charlotte community with complimentary refreshments and wine, with parking included. $30-$50. 

➡️ List your event on the Ledger events board.