NORTH MANKATO — A dozen newsroom personnel have been eliminated from KEYC-TV in a labor reduction move that affected a dozen Gray Media-owned television stations across the country.
Mitch Keegan, KEYC’s news director, confirmed the staff reduction but declined to comment on which newsroom employees were let go or how many. Despite the layoffs, Keegan said the station still hopes to provide robust local news and sports coverage
Staff was notified of the layoffs — which were effective immediately — in a meeting at the station Friday. No sales or administrative staff were affected. A screenshot of the email sent to the affected employees shows 12 people were ordered to attend Friday’s meeting.
“We’ve combined some positions and resources with our sister station, KTTC-TV out of Rochester, to provide local and regional newscasts, and that includes our morning and noon newscast as well as some of our newscasts on the weekends,” Keegan said. “Along with that, we’re actually going to be expanding some newscast offerings.”
He said they’ll add news on weekend mornings, a first for KEYC, and soon they’ll expand the station’s noon broadcast from 30 minutes to an hour. The new twist, however, is that those programs will originate in Rochester. Keegan said the Rochester-based programs “will still include important local information.”
KEYC’s daily newscasts at 5, 6 and 10 p.m. still will be produced in Mankato and include local news, but just how much remains to be seen. With most of the news staff gone — it appears all but one news reporter has been laid off — it’s unclear how the team left in Mankato will cover the community with the same verve it has in the past.
“We’re still going to continue to provide as much local information as we can,” Keegan said.
The KEYC team’s ability to do that will be tested this week as the most-watched election in decades plays out. National races are getting the most attention, but there are plenty of important local races, too.
Two reporters, both of whom declined to speak on the record for fear of jeopardizing a severance agreement, said reporters called to Friday’s meeting were blindsided by the announcement. They said they were told Thursday to report to the meeting Friday but weren’t told the nature of it.
Two weeks prior, they said they’d been assured that, while the company was experiencing financial challenges, their jobs were safe. So when the news came that all employees called to the meeting were out of a job effective immediately, some were stunned, others were angry. One reporter said they felt betrayed.
“They said it was not any fault of ours and that the industry was changing,” one reporter said. “It was a very corporate-speak meeting, very impersonal.”
KEYC has operated since 1960, first briefly as an NBC affiliate, but mostly as a CBS affiliate. It was purchased by Gray Media in 2019.
The station will continue to produce and broadcast its “Kato Living” show as well as the polka staple “Bandwagon,” the longest continuously running music show in America.