Sacramento Bee eliminates sports department, including Kings beat reporter

The Sacramento Kings are about to lose one of the reporters who chronicled them every day. The city is losing considerably more than that.

The Sacramento Bee has eliminated its remaining sports department as part of sweeping layoffs by parent company McClatchy, as relayed by Awful Announcing.

Kings beat reporter Jason Anderson, 49ers reporter Chris Biderman and longtime high school sports reporter Joe Davidson were all informed their positions had been eliminated. Their final day will be Oct. 9.

Anderson, a Sacramento native, has covered the Kings for the Bee for eight seasons.

“Covering the Kings was always my dream job,” Anderson wrote. “All I wanted to do was cover this team for this newspaper and this community.”

There will still be Kings coverage, of course. Scores, highlights, quotes and transactions aren’t going anywhere. But daily beat reporting is something different. It provides institutional knowledge, relationships, follow-up questions and a person in the room when answers don’t quite add up.

The Kings aren’t just entertainment in Sacramento. They’re part of the city’s identity, and Anderson covered them as someone who understood both.

The broader McClatchy cuts eliminated more than 90 unionized positions across 17 publications, or roughly 30 percent of the company’s unionized workforce, according to the Associated Press.

Those are corporate numbers. Anderson’s message explained what they actually mean.

The Kings will keep playing, and news will keep moving. But Sacramento will have one fewer experienced reporter asking what happened, why it happened and what comes next.