Over the summer, journalists at McClatchy battled with management over the company’s plans to use artificial intelligence — and union members, organized in several regional guilds, largely seemed to be making headway. In July, newspapers in Washington State and Idaho ratified a union contract with significant AI provisions, including ones preventing the company from using AI to replace staff, using AI to impersonate journalists, or disciplining members for a chatbot’s mistakes. A month later, journalists at the Centre Daily Times, in State College, Pennsylvania, unionized and ratified an agreement that included AI protections, allowing journalists to withhold bylines from AI-assisted stories without fear of being penalized. The gains happened in just a few short months.
Then, last week, McClatchy laid off more than 90 unionized media workers across 17 publications, according to the NewsGuild, making these hard-won agreements look like drops in a bucket that had just been tipped over. The cuts affected each newsroom differently — some lost three unionized reporters; others lost eight or 12. At the Miami Herald, where journalists had filed a grievance over McClatchy’s use of a “content scaling agent,” or CSA tool, as it’s known, 20 unionized journalists and five managers were laid off — representing roughly a quarter of the newsroom.
It remains unclear what role AI will play in McClatchy’s future.
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