Neil Chase, executive editor of Bay Area News Group, which oversees the Times, said newspapers had not yet figured out how to counter slumping ad revenue. “Nobody is happy about this,” he said of the cuts. “I’m certainly not.”

Since 2001, American newspapers have shed more than half of their work force. Evidence of the culling in California is everywhere:

— A labor survey found that newsrooms in the East Bay and South Bay shrank by more than a third in the last five years.

— With fewer than 500 newsroom employees, The Los Angeles Times is now less than half of what it was in 2000.

— According to a Pew survey in 2014, the number of newspaper reporters assigned to the statehouse, 24, had fallen by a third from a decade earlier.

“It’s been ugly,” said Gabriel Kahn, a journalism professor at U.S.C.

There have been some bright spots. Nonprofit journalism start-ups have expanded in California over the past decade.

Among the entrants are Voice of OC, which produces investigative reporting in Orange County, and inewsource, which does the same in San Diego. Another, CALmatters, was formed in 2015 with the help of tech industry donors to stem the decline of reporting on state politics.

“I just thought it’s crazy that in the state nobody knows who represents them in Sacramento, and the reason they don’t is that there’s no coverage,” said Simone Coxe, a former public relations executive in Palo Alto who co-founded CALmatters.