In a Stockton Newsroom, One Reporter Covers City Hall, Crime, and Schools. Alone.

Amanda Chen sits in the fourth-floor newsroom of The Stockton Record at 7:38 on a Tuesday morning, eating yogurt from a plastic cup and reading the police blotter on her phone. The newsroom is the size of a basketball court. There are sixty-four desks. Fifty-nine are empty. At the desk nearest the window, which overlooks Franklin Street and the shuttered Macy's, a potted fern has been dead for what Chen estimates is eleven months. No one has removed it.

Chen is thirty-one years old. She has worked at The Record for six years. She is the newspaper's only full-time reporter covering Stockton, California—a city of 320,000 people, the thirteenth largest in the state. She covers city hall. She covers the police department. She covers the school board, the water district, the port authority, and the county health department. She covers homicides, which averaged one every four days last year. She covers fires. On weekends, she covers high school football because the sports editor was laid off in January.

At the other four occupied desks sit: a copy editor who works remotely from Sacramento three days a week; a photographer who also shoots for the Modesto Bee and the Fresno Bee under a regional contract; a page designer in Manila who logs in at 9 p.m. Pacific Time; and an editor named Marcus Webb, fifty-seven, who has worked at The Record for thirty-two years and who now edits Chen's stories, assigns her stories, writes headlines, manages the website, sells some advertising, and, twice a week, drives to the printing plant in Fairfield to troubleshoot the press when it jams.

The other fifty-nine desks are relics of a newsroom that existed until 2011, when The Record employed forty-seven journalists. Then it was thirty-one in 2014. Then nineteen in 2017. Then eleven in 2019. Then five in 2022. The layoffs came in waves timed to quarterly earnings calls. The owner is a hedge fund called Alden Global Capital, which has acquired over two hundred newspapers since 2010 and reduced newsroom staff at each by an average of sixty-two percent, according to a 2024 study by the University of North Carolina's Hussman School of Journalism. The business model, researchers found, is extraction: cut costs, maximize profit margins above thirty percent, and prepare assets for resale or closure.

What Amanda Covers in a Week

I meet Chen on a Wednesday in April. She arrives at the newsroom at seven-thirty. Her first story of the day is already written—she filed it at eleven the previous night, after the city council meeting ended. The meeting concerned a proposed sales tax increase to fund police overtime. The council voted four to three in favor. Chen's story is six hundred and forty words. It will appear on page A3 of the print edition and was posted to the website at eleven forty-seven p.m. By morning it has been read by three thousand two hundred people, according to the analytics dashboard Webb shows me. The newspaper's total print circulation is eleven thousand; the website averages forty-one thousand unique visitors per month, down from ninety-three thousand in 2019.

By eight a.m., Chen has written two more stories. One is a three-hundred-word report on an overnight shooting in the Serenity Village neighborhood that left one man hospitalized. She called the police spokesman at six-fifty a.m.; he gave her the victim's age, the location, and the time of the incident, but no suspect information. The second story is four hundred words on a water-main break that closed Pacific Avenue between Fremont and Market Streets. She called the public works department, got a quote from the director, and included an estimated repair timeline. Both stories are posted by eight-fifteen.

At nine, Chen attends a press conference at the county health department about a tuberculosis outbreak at a homeless encampment near the port. She is the only reporter present. The health director, Dr. Maria Salazar, reads from a prepared statement and takes no questions. Chen files a five-hundred-word story by ten-thirty. At eleven, she drives to the municipal courthouse to hear closing arguments in a fraud trial involving a former school board treasurer. At one-fifteen, she is back at her desk, eating a sandwich and writing a seven-hundred-word story about the trial. At two, she has a phone interview with the new fire chief. At three, she drives to Edison High School to cover a protest by parents opposed to a new cell-phone ban. At five, she returns to the newsroom and writes an eight-hundred-word story about the protest. At six, Webb tells her there has been a stabbing at the Greyhound station. She drives there, speaks to witnesses, calls the police spokesman again, and files a four-hundred-word story by seven-thirty.

She has written seven stories. Total word count: four thousand one hundred and forty. She has attended two events, conducted five phone interviews, and driven forty-three miles. Tomorrow she will do it again.

The Algorithm Writes the Rest

The Stockton Record publishes, on average, eighteen stories per day. Amanda Chen writes four to six of them. The remainder are written by an artificial-intelligence system called Chorus, licensed from a company called Automated Insights, which was acquired by a private equity firm in 2023. Chorus generates stories from structured data: sports scores, weather reports, real estate transactions, obituaries, traffic accidents, and police logs.

The system works as follows. Each night, data feeds from the California Highway Patrol, the San Joaquin County Assessor's Office, the National Weather Service, and high school sports associations are imported into Chorus. The software parses the data, identifies newsworthy elements, and generates text using templates. A story about a car accident on Interstate 5, for example, is built from this template: "A [number]-vehicle collision on [road name] near [location] at [time] resulted in [injuries/fatalities]. The California Highway Patrol reported that [details]. [Road name] was [closed/partially closed] for [duration]." The software fills in the variables. A human editor—Webb—reviews a sample of the stories each morning, but does not read all of them. Most are published automatically.

The stories are formulaic, accurate within the limits of their data sources, and utterly devoid of context. A story about a home sale on West Yokuts Avenue will report the price, the square footage, the buyer's name, and the seller's name. It will not report that the home is in a neighborhood where thirteen houses have been sold to investors in the past six months, or that residents have complained to the city about absentee landlords, or that the median rent in the neighborhood has increased by forty-one percent since 2022. Those stories require a reporter who can attend city council meetings, request public records, and interview residents. The Record no longer has the staff to do that on most stories.

Webb tells me that Chorus saves the paper approximately eighty-five thousand dollars per year—the equivalent of two entry-level reporter salaries. The system generates about seventy percent of the paper's content by volume, though Chen's human-written stories account for seventy-four percent of total readership, according to analytics data. The AI stories are read primarily by people searching for specific information: a home address, a sports score, an obituary. They arrive via search engines, read one story, and leave.

What Used to Be Covered

In 2008, The Stockton Record employed forty-nine journalists. There were dedicated reporters for education, health, business, environment, courts, and sports. There was a three-person investigative team. There was a features section, a food critic, and a photographer who shot only portraits. The paper won three California Newspaper Publishers Association awards that year, including one for an investigation into misuse of redevelopment funds by the city council.

I ask Webb what stories The Record no longer covers. He takes out a yellow legal pad and begins writing. The list includes: the county Board of Supervisors, except when Chen can attend; the Stockton Unified School District board, except major votes; the port commission; the planning commission; the mosquito abatement district; local elections for positions below city council; ribbon cuttings and groundbreakings, unless a major employer is involved; most nonprofit events; most high school sports except football and basketball; arts and theater; restaurant openings and closings; and almost all feature stories that are not tied to breaking news.

The loss of institutional coverage has consequences. In 2023, the Stockton city council approved a twenty-three-million-dollar contract with a waste management company without competitive bidding. The contract was not covered by The Record because Chen was attending a homicide trial that day. The story was broken five weeks later by a blogger named Luis Perez, who runs a website called Stockton Real, which he funds through a Patreon account with two hundred and eleven subscribers. Perez attended the meeting, obtained the contract documents through a public records request, and published a four-thousand-word investigation alleging that two council members had financial ties to the company. The story was subsequently picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Sacramento Bee. The FBI opened an investigation. The contract was rescinded.

I ask Perez, forty-four, how he funds his work. He tells me he works full-time as a high school history teacher. He publishes Stockton Real in the evenings and on weekends. He attends city council meetings, school board meetings, and port commission meetings. He files public records requests. He has no journalism training. He learned by reading other investigations and by trial and error. His Patreon income last year was eleven thousand four hundred dollars. He spent ninety-two hundred of it on public records request fees, website hosting, and a used camera.

The Economics of Extraction

Alden Global Capital acquired The Stockton Record in 2011 as part of a bankruptcy sale of MediaNews Group. The price was not disclosed. At the time, The Record had annual revenues of approximately fourteen million dollars and operating expenses of eleven million, according to documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. The paper was profitable.

By 2024, The Record's revenues had declined to approximately four million dollars—a seventy-one percent drop. Operating expenses had been cut to one point three million, a reduction of eighty-eight percent. The paper's profit margin in 2024 was thirty-two percent, according to a confidential financial summary obtained by the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica and shared with me. The industry average for newspapers is eleven percent. The Record's margin was achieved by reducing staff, eliminating benefits, cutting print frequency from seven days to five, outsourcing design and copy editing to the Philippines, and automating content production through AI.

Alden Global Capital declined to comment for this story. The company's president, Heath Freeman, has said in previous interviews that the newspaper industry is in structural decline and that cost reductions are necessary to preserve any journalism at all. In a 2022 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Freeman said: "We are not in the business of charity. We are in the business of keeping newspapers alive by making them financially sustainable."

Penelope Muse Abernathy, a professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and author of The State of Local News 2024, has documented the collapse of local newspapers across the United States. Since 2004, more than eighteen hundred newspapers have closed, leaving roughly seventy million Americans in areas with no local news coverage—what Abernathy calls "news deserts." The closures have been concentrated in rural areas and small cities, but they are accelerating in mid-sized cities like Stockton. "What we're seeing is not market failure," Abernathy tells me. "It's extraction. The business model is to maximize short-term profit by liquidating the journalism, then sell or close the paper. It is not designed to produce sustainable news organizations."

What Happens When Nobody Is Watching

The consequences of local news collapse are measurable. A 2023 study by researchers at the University of Illinois and Notre Dame found that municipal borrowing costs increase by an average of eleven basis points when a city loses its local newspaper. The reason: without journalistic oversight, investors perceive higher risk of corruption or financial mismanagement. The increased borrowing costs translate to millions of dollars in additional interest payments for taxpayers. A separate study by Stanford University economists Joshua Darr and Matthew Hitt found that voter turnout in local elections declines by an average of four percentage points after a local newspaper closes.

In Stockton, the effects are visible. Between 2018 and 2024, the city issued one hundred and fourteen contracts worth a combined three hundred and eleven million dollars without competitive bidding, according to records obtained by Perez through public records requests. Of those, The Stockton Record covered six. Voter turnout in city council elections fell from thirty-one percent in 2016 to eighteen percent in 2024. The city's general fund deficit increased from nine million dollars in 2018 to forty-three million in 2024, according to audited financial statements. The Record did not report on the deficit until the city announced a hiring freeze in February 2025.

Marcus Webb, the editor, acknowledges the gaps. "I know what we're not covering," he says. "I make a list every week of stories we should be doing and can't. The list is longer than the stories we publish. But I have one reporter. What do you want me to do?"

The Folder on the Shelf

On a shelf behind Marcus Webb's desk, between a photograph of his daughter and a coffee mug from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, sits a folder labeled "Investigations." Inside are notes, documents, and interview transcripts for stories the newsroom began but never finished. One file concerns a pattern of police stops in predominantly Black neighborhoods that Webb believes amounts to illegal profiling. Another concerns allegations of sexual harassment by a county supervisor. A third concerns contamination of groundwater near a shuttered fertilizer plant.

Webb started each investigation in 2021, when the newsroom still had three reporters. He assigned one reporter to each story. By the time the reporters had completed initial reporting, two of them had been laid off. The third, Amanda Chen, was reassigned to daily breaking news. The investigations were shelved. Webb has not opened the folder since 2022. He opens it now, slowly, and stares at the contents for what feels like a very long time.

"This is what we used to do," he says. "This is what a newspaper is supposed to do. And we just—can't anymore."

He closes the folder and places it back on the shelf. Outside, the sun is setting over Franklin Street. The dead fern casts a shadow across the empty desks. Somewhere in the building, a phone is ringing. Nobody answers it.