I have written previously about the death of the Lexington Herald-Leader, a newspaper which is near and dear to my heart. I not only delivered the morning Lexington Herald and afternoon Lexington Leader in the late 1960s — yes, I’m that old! — but my sadly late best friend Ken Vermillion and I had several articles published in the paper in the mid 1970s. I noted the change in home delivery of the print edition to just three days a week, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday, though the Sunday edition will be delivered on Saturday, by the United States Postal Service. Executive Editor and General Manager Richard A Green wrote, on May 31, 2024:

Beginning Aug. 5, we will transition to a 24/7 digital product with three days of high-quality, locally focused print editions a week.

Perhaps I have misunderstood what Mr Green meant, but I thought he was saying that the “24/7 digital product” would include the “high-quality, locally focused” product as well, not that the print editions would be the exclusively “high-quality, locally focused” publications.

I found this, first in my national feed, this morning:

Kentucky volleyball is just two wins away from total SEC perfection

Kentucky volleyball nears perfect SEC Season, eyes #1 NCAA seed

By Drew Holbrook | Monday, November 10, 2025

Craig Skinner doesn’t run from challenges, he hunts them. And once again, Kentucky Volleyball has answered the call.

Despite two early-season losses (both to ranked teams, including one to number 1 Nebraska), the Wildcats have run roughshod through the SEC, stacking ranked win after ranked win while climbing into the national top two. The schedule has been brutal. The response has been elite. Kentucky volleyball is nearing perfection.

You can follow the embedded link to read the rest of the story, but Kentucky has won all thirteen Southeastern Conference volleyball matches played, and has lost only seven sets in those thirteen matches. UK recently beat then #2 Texas 3-0, on the road. But you wouldn’t know it is your news source is the Herald-Leader! UK just beat #19 Tennessee 3-1, in Memorial Coliseum, a venue only a few miles from the newspaper’s offices

I informed Mr Green via a directly addressed tweet, something he should have seen anyway, since he follows me on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — as I had on November 5^th, following the victory over Texas.

What Mr Vermillion used to call the Herald-Liberal maintains a specific UK Sports page on its website, which shows 24 stories as of 8:24 AM EST on Tuesday. Naturally, most are about the University’s football and men’s basketball teams, though there are a couple on women’s basketball, but somehow not a single story on a legitimate contender for the NCAA championship.

Perhaps this has something to do with yet further cutbacks at McClatchy, which owns the Lexington newspaper. Editor & Publisher reported on McClatchy’s “quiet cuts”:

On Monday (November 3, 2025) morning, staffers across McClatchy’s real-time news desk received an unexpected invitation to a hastily arranged Zoom meeting at noon. The calendar invite was vague, referring only in general terms to a restructuring update. The team wasn’t too taken aback by it; they knew change was coming. But they didn’t anticipate what awaited them when they logged on.

When the journalists on the nearly two dozen-strong team joined the call, they were hit with stunning news: McClatchy was eliminating the entire real-time news operation, which effectively operated as its national breaking news desk. The announcement left the team reeling. Their employment, they were told, would end on November 14.

Upon reading this, I checked to see if Mr Green was still the Editor and General Manager of the Herald-Leader, and he was still listed as such, at least as of the October 17, 2025 update to their About Us page.

The Columbia Journalism Review reported on staff cuts at McClatchy, as well as recent layoffs at CBS News, NBC News, Axios, and Teen Vogue, but the stress point of that story was the end of DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — and that many of the layoffs and job losses were among people who were not white males.

The newspaper did cover UK’s last volleyball NCAA championship, in 2020.

I still have a soft spot in my heart for the Herald-Leader, and for newspapers in general, because I much prefer to read the news than try to watch it on television. But if the Lexington newspaper, which has long specialized in UK sports, can’t cover a potential national championship team, I have to wonder just how much longer it can last. Newspapers cannot increase their sales by cutting back on the quantity and quality of their reporting.