Good grief! Is there no end to the calamity!

The silver lining that gave hope to newspapers around the country – “It can’t get any worse” – has been drowned by the dark clouds of the coronavirus, which has closed more than 60 newsrooms in America in 2020.

Among entities that has their claws on the BJ over the decades:

Sound Publishing in Washington state laid off 70 people in its Washington and Alaska newsrooms. Sound Publishing owns 49 newsrooms, and the layoffs make up 20% of its workforce. Sound also suspended four print publications in Kitsap County and reduced staff.

Seven McClatchy newspapers will move out of their newsrooms and work remotely for the rest of the year. They are the Miami Herald, the Charlotte (North Carolina) Observer, the McClatchy D.C. office, The State in Columbia, South Carolina, The Modesto (California) Bee, the Merced (California) Sun-Star and the San Luis Obispo (California) Tribune. McClatchy furloughed 4.4% of staff at its 30 papers around the country.

And in Ohio:

Three copy editors took buyouts at the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, Poynter. It is owned by Gannett.

Cleveland Scene in Ohio laid off five staffers.

Mount Vernon (Ohio) News, which was locally owned, was sold to Metric Media LLC, cut down to two print days a week and took down its paywall online.

It didn’t matter whether the newspaper was large or small, either.

Hell, the birthplace of the Pulitzer Prizes,  the St. Louis Post Dispatch, eliminated a digital sports editor position. It is owned by Lee Enterprises.

Tribune Publishing announced permanent pay cuts of between 2% and 10% and executives will take pay cuts. Tribune newsrooms include the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, The Baltimore Sun and The Virginian-Pilot. It also had furloughs.

When newspapers suffer, so does democracy. They are the watchdogs who shine the public spotlight on corruption by politicians and businesses. Without newspapers, it’s a field day for the big, the bad and the ugly in America.

To read depressing details of the carnage, click on Here are the newsroom layoffs, furloughs and closures caused by the coronavirus - Poynter