Maybe I’m biased, but I think newspapers are vital to communities and essential for functioning democracies. Daily papers, especially, serve to inform the public and act as an important check on government, which is why watching The Tribune shrivel and shrink feels tragic.
If you haven’t heard, the Trib’s parent company, McClatchy, recently laid off three reporters from our local publication plus one photographer and Opinion Editor Stephanie Finucane. In fact, the company laid off at least 90 people at several of its publications nationwide. Some newsrooms reportedly lost 40 percent of their staff.
Journalism might be a vocation, but newspapers are a business, and one that’s been increasingly unprofitable. It’s hard to blame McClatchy for doing what it must to survive. The question is: Will what’s left of a gutted Trib retain its value? McClatchy’s spinning the cuts as beneficial to subscribers:
“McClatchy is reshaping its newsroom structure to more closely align resources with changing subscriber interests and the ways audiences engage with local news,” the company said in a notice provided to Pacific Media Workers Guild, a union representing journalists at three McClatchy papers. “As part of this change, we’re focusing resources on journalism that subscribers value and that can have the highest impact in the communities we serve.”
In other words, we’re taking something away from you to serve you better. Right. Got it. Are we getting AI instead of real journalists? I suspect it’s possible.
The Trib reported on Sept. 15 that 55-year-old SLO resident Kristoffer Hans Pfister was arrested for alleged public intoxication while dressed in KKK-style white robes and a pointy hat. The report’s information seemed to come from the police report on Pfister’s arrest, and the accompanying photo was downloaded from Reddit.
That’s not exactly boots-on-the-ground reporting that daily papers are known for. Will that kind of journalism ever be possible again with a shrinking staff? It’s not like AI is going to walk a beat.
Weekly papers like New Times were never designed to cover breaking news. I feel for those laid off, and I wish The Tribune and its remaining employees well. Hopefully it will survive and thrive. Now more than ever, as democracy is under assault, we need the Fourth Estate and an informed electorate.
Speaking of which, come Nov. 3, it’ll be time to vote, and if you live in Templeton, two positions you’ll be voting for are open seats on the Templeton Unified School Board of Trustees. I know. Zzz. But maybe it’s more important than you think.
Incumbents Janel Armet and Jennifer Grinager are running as well as newcomer Forrest Pearson. A lot of voters don’t fill out their whole ballot because in some cases, they don’t feel informed enough on certain races. School board candidates are often unknown, and some voters think, “I don’t have a kid in school, so why bother?”
The SLO County Democratic Party really wants you to bother because these small, local offices can make a difference in protecting democracy from authoritarianism. They’ve endorsed Pearson. They’re also hosting a fundraiser specifically for their endorsed school board candidates: screening the documentary Moms Club on Sept. 28 in the Fremont Theater. The documentary follows a group of SoCal moms fighting back against protesters and school board members trying to take rights and protections away from LGBTQ-plus students.
“School boards in SLO County are under assault from book burners, religious fanatics, and white nationalists,” the SLO Dems say on their event poster. “This film exposes the corporate dark-money underworld behind it, proving this is anything but a ‘grassroots’ movement.”
Pearson’s a teacher at Grizzly Youth Academy, where he teaches at-risk youth English and history. Seems like a safe and sane bet.
But between Armet and Grinager, what to do? Well, Grinager is the secretary of the SLO County chapter of Moms for Liberty, an organization whose goal is to protect “parents’ rights.” They want schools to notify them if their kids are going gay or trans. Rat kids out about their pronouns! They want to restrict discussions on race and gender and influence school policy, even though policies are in place because some LGBTQ-plus students don’t feel safe coming out to their parents.
“We are empowering moms, proclaiming liberty, and raising a new generation of patriots,” Moms for Liberty’s website states.
Remember! A good patriot is cisgendered! Also, the USA is racism free! Whee!
Grinager told New Times that her proudest accomplishment from her four years on the board is “private changing spaces and bathrooms.” Wouldn’t want any trans kids around when you’re changing out of your gym clothes, right?
Grinager wrote a letter to California representatives Jimmy Panetta, Alex Padilla, and Adam Schiff to complain about laws they passed protecting migrant and LGBTQ-plus children. She lamented “the stupidity of tampons in boys’ bathrooms and allowing boys and girls to comingle in bathrooms and locker rooms,” and that “the policy for migrant education goes against our U.S. Constitution! Do you even care about that?! It says that we must not even ask for proof of residency nor vaccination.”
The madness of educating migrant children! My lord!
“Honestly, I hope President Trump does remove federal funding from California,” she added. “We don’t deserve it. Our kids deserve better, but what you have been voting for is not it. Do better and have some common sense.”
Be careful what you vote for. ∆
The Shredder buys ink by the barrel. Tell it to stop the presses at shredder@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Sept 17-24, 2026.
The Democratic party has abandoned jobs and replaced them with boutique social issues. No wonder sane people have left it to rot in the dust.
In the last several decades, Democratic presidents have created significantly more jobs than Republican presidents. Additionally, real wage and income growth for typical workers has historically tended to be faster and more equal during Democratic administrations than during Republican ones since 1970.
More recently, 1.4 million jobs were created in 2024 under the Biden administration. In 2025 under the Trump administration there was zero net job creation. As for wages, they were keeping pace with inflation until very recently as Trump administration decisions on tariffs and foreign wars have pushed inflation up to nearly 4%, not nearly as high as in the aftermath of the pandemic under the Biden administration but still not within the goals of the Fed, who have pushed interest rates back up.
Any jobs created by Democratic presidents, have been public sector jobs funded by taxpayer’s money. Is that really anything to brag about? And sometimes the jobs are imaginary, such as many of the jobs supposedly protected by Biden’s Covid business relief grants which were paid to scams. But if the objective is just to spend as much money as possible, I suppose they were successful.
The research I’ve done tells me that since 1980, more than 50 million net jobs were added during the administrations of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, averaging significantly higher monthly job growth than their Republican counterparts.
Under Republicans, net job growth was roughly 15 to 17 million since 1980 (almost all of those during the Reagan administration when President Reagan, in his wisdom, worked closely with a Democratic Congress) as three Republican terms ended with major economic downturns, including the recession of 1992, the great recession of 2008 and the 2020 pandemic (I would argue the COVID crisis was badly mishandled by the Trump administration).
The vast majority of this overall job growth since 1980–over 45 million jobs—occurred in the private sector rather than government employment. In fact, the 50 million jobs created by Democrats pales in comparison to the roughly 6 million government jobs created during this period.
Facts speak for themselves.
Following Reagan’s election in 1980, the crippling inflation from Carter was tamed, and we regained prosperity. Clinton and the economy benefited from the end of the Cold War which Reagan and Bush Sr. created by standing up to the Soviets, freeing up a lot of money for domestic spending and keeping the debt down.
Quite the choice to write what reads as a hit piece against a well respected newspaper providing daily coverage to the citizens of SLO county despite the recent cuts. An especially interesting choice coming from a weekly paper whose articles, I would argue, could also be said to be ripped from police reports and reddit photos. Maybe the writers at New Times should take their own advice and stay in their (weekly) lane.
What a sad and distasteful take on the Tribune’s layoffs and coverage. You’d think a weekly so-called news outlet like New Times would want to back another in a struggling industry.
I want to leave a comment but I don’t know what to say. The writing is so poor that I couldn’t understand it. It talked about 5 other things at the end. the article was jumping all over the place and this is why I stick to the Tribune for my local news
John D:
Exactly. As someone with both a full-time job in the public sector and a second, part-time job in the private sector, we need more private sector jobs. This can be done by incentivizing private business to set up shop through eliminating the onerous permitting process and limited tax breaks.
As much as Michael Smith wants to denigrate the private sector and Republican administrations, he is probably the first to complain when his taxes go up because there is no more industrial base to tax instead. If he is like most liberals, he probably welcomes open borders as long as illegals don’t live in his neighborhood, instead, shoving them into the tenements native born, underpaid, Americans live.
BUILD THE WALL
My neighbors are almost all migrant farmworkers. Salt of the earth, but no, I’m not in favor of open borders. The U.S. needs comprehensive immigration reform, but since the two major political parties simply talk past each other (as I do with my reactionary friends on this board) nothing will get done and Mr. Fly will be complaining about “illegal immigration” until he’s my age.
Illegal immigration is sharply down under Trump. It can be done if you want to do it. Even Biden was able to reduce it in the last few months before the election once he realized that his open borders were hurting him politically.
If the Dems actually grow a pair and quit pandering to the voting relatives of illegals, they might actually attract voters.
Nowhere in any of my screeds will you see me attack farm worker’s character, rather, what I will attack is unfettered illegal immigration. I paid for and did all the work myself to obtain my (brown) wife and stepson’s green card. Why would would I advocate for illegal immigration? The math doesn’t even work. As an AI what the price of a head of lettuce would be if farm worker’s were paid $25 an hour. Lettuce only goes up ten to fifteen cents per head. So the argument that we need illegal farm labor because Americans won’t pick lettuce. How much you wanna bet Americans would pick lettuce for $25 an hour? I sure would. Further, let’s prosecute every single employer who hires illegals for dodging the taxes they are required to pay.
You would last an hour picking lettuce.
You don’t know me. Having a father disappear when I was 13, go to prison, and get raised by a chronic alcoholic mother, I learned to work from a young age. I was also an enlisted soldier on active duty. I would gladly pick lettuce for $25 an hour on the cool and breezy Hayashi family farm
What is it with the right’s sick obsession with children’s genitalia? I remember the class giggling when the Health teacher tried to apply a condom to a banana. Now you have to drop your shorts to play volleyball.
What is it with the left’s insistence that a twelve year old should be able to go along with the social media crowd, and lop off body parts?
👍
How’s this for boots-on-the-ground reporting? https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/crime/article317306913.html
Hello.ong time no see ….I didn’t bother reading the published or any contributes here yet .. all I can say is besides the Dem party needing a root canal is….we gotta go left or were all gonna die. The electronic robotic centers are a step to controlling and destroying the masses ….also why the bunkers are being built. We have an enormous challenge ahead …the robots and machines cannot beat us. They cannot play a violin concerto or paint a masterpiece properly the human element must not be destroyed …we must destroy them . John Edwards
Why cannot SLO show the way with public train transit to Morro Bay and Avila extending down to oceano for starters. Nice open air cars for tourist sun season switched to cars for inclement winter weather. Park the car..ride the train …..it’s true we invested too heavily in car culture and not enough in public transportation . Why can’t we join the world….answer ….we are too heavily invested in war and associated industries it appears . People must speak up .