A version of the following article appeared in the September 14, 2026, edition of The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with local business-y news and insights for Charlotte, N.C.
Need to subscribe — or upgrade your Ledger e-newsletter subscription? Details here.
Analysis: Instead of building a sustainable business model, The Charlotte Observer’s parent company doubled down on clickbait. Now, local reporters are losing their jobs.
The Charlotte Observer’s former headquarters at 600 S. Tryon St., a reminder of an era when the newspaper had hundreds of journalists and a commanding presence in Charlotte. The building was demolished in 2016. (Photo: Getty Images)
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 …
The 2024 merger between McClatchy and the parent company of Us Weekly, whose articles regularly appear on The Observer’s website? (Observer headline and X post on Saturday: “Sydney Sweeney Poses Nude Behind Baseball Bat in Sporty Ad Campaign”)
Headlines like “Wegmans reveals Charlotte grocery store’s opening date,” with the need to click the article instead of just saying it opens Oct. 14?
The existence until late 2025 of a national McClatchy “real time team” of 20+ reporters that wrote about trending topics that might go viral, such as lottery winners, horrific crimes, newly discovered species and the antics of sharks and snakes?
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.
McClatchy CEO Tony Hunter (Photo: McClatchy)
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:
“The future of Charlotte media is digital and niche” (November 2019)