Allison Guinn was the assistant managing editor and lost her job in May. She has been freelancing and looking for full-time work outside of journalism.

Not long after, Parody was laid off . And then we heard that the state wasn’t doing what it had said it would, and that even the Winter Haven police department wasn’t testing all the kits. But the reporter’s not there anymore, and it was like it all disappeared from institutional knowledge. If you’re going to break a story, if you’re going to push it, it’s heartbreaking that you don’t get to be there to follow through. As an editor, that’s what kept me up at night.

When I was a reporter, I covered Lakeland City Hall, the biggest city in our area, and when I became an editor, I kept up writing, just because we needed to fill holes. We still managed to get some good stories out there. But follow-ups were killing us. For example, we had a reporter, Clifford Parody, who had gone after the backlog of rape kits in Florida, and the state said they would go through and test all the kits. The Winter Haven police had a couple of arrests as a result of the testing, which we wrote about . It was evidence that this really difficult story that this really talented reporter had done was making a difference .

— @alliguinn

— The Greeley Tribune —

Ms. Delaney covered local sports in Greeley and the surrounding area. This month, she was told the newspaper was cutting her and another sports reporter’s positions, just a year after she had moved to Colorado for the job.

You talk to athletic directors, you talk to coaches, you go to games. You call people and hope you reach them somehow. And then you go from there.

Last month, an athletic director called me to tell me a football coach was stepping down after the season because he trusted me. When I got that information, I wrote a story on the coach: I talked to him, talked to a player, talked to a coach at an opposing high school, and boom — we’re off to the races. That’s how it works. If we’re losing journalists, how does that all work? I don’t know what’s next. What happens if somebody steals from the booster club? I hope it doesn’t happen, but if someone like me is here, people can feel free to call and say, ‘Hey, you ought to check this out.’ What happens when nobody is around?

There’s one story that’s not going to happen but I really wanted to get to. Some schools in the area have really struggled with not having enough bus drivers. I was going to take a look at that problem from a sports perspective: How are teams getting to games? How are the schedules changing? Does that lead to longer days? I tried to put this in motion a few times in the fall and somebody didn’t get back to me or I got sidetracked by another assignment. I hate that.