USA Today, one of the nation’s most comprehensive news providers and owner of the Stockton Record, has laid off editorial employees and is reorganizing to cope with technological changes resulting in less reader traffic from search engines, according to a memo from the company.
Locally, the layoff reportedly includes one of four reporters at the Record. No one at the newspaper could be reached Friday for confirmation of the reduction in force.
USA Today, which changed its name last year from Gannett Co., announced the layoffs and reorganization in two memos to staff. The memos, obtained by New York Times media reporter Ben Mullin, came from the company’s senior vice president and senior vice president for local news. Mullin posted both memos on his account on X.
The missives say that simply publishing more news stories and hoping that readers come to news sites through search engines isn’t working anymore.
“Search traffic is under pressure,” one of the memos states, “and platforms are increasingly keeping user content to themselves instead of sending them back to us.”
Online news has been reeling from the loss of search traffic as news summaries are being culled from AI. Now, when smartphone or computer users search for general news or a specific story, a summary appears at the top of the search instead of a headline and a link to a story. Thus, there’s less incentive to click to a USA Today site to get the gist of a news story.
Forbes reported last year that nearly 60% of searches resulted in no click-throughs to other sites because of AI tools from ChatGPT and others.
USA Today did not say how many employees were laid off. Like many news organizations once centered around newspapers or magazines, it has been gradually reducing staff for more than a decade.
USA Today hinted at the reorganization Aug. 6 when it released it’s second-quarter earnings.
“Consumer discovery continues to evolve beyond traditional search, and we have been preparing for that shift by expanding our reach across social, video and newsletters while strengthening our first-party audience capabilities,” the company said.
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