Josh Moyer remembers the exact moment he decided he needed to unionize. Moyer is a senior reporter for the Centre Daily Times, a newspaper in State College, PA, and for months he had been concerned about a new AI tool being rolled out in his newsroom.
McClatchy, the Centre Daily Times’ parent company, had chosen the paper as an early test market for its Content Scaling Agent (CSA). The tool repackages existing articles on McClatchy sites, essentially drafting short-form AI-generated summaries of them to publish as new articles or to use as video scripts. The tool drew the ire of reporters across McClatchy’s network of 30 local newspapers, due to factual errors output by the tool and disagreements over how to label the published content.
Moyer was reading a story published by The Wrap in April about the controversy, including the decision of unionized newspapers like The Sacramento Bee to withhold their bylines from CSA-produced stories in protest. During a March 17 internal staff meeting, Kathy Vetter, McClatchy’s chief of staff for local news, said, “If they don’t have the ability in their contract to remove their byline, we’re going to use their name,” according to The Wrap’s reporting.
To Moyer, that statement was a call to action.
“It was essentially like, if you’re not in a union, your byline gets used; if you are in a union, we’ll follow what the union says,” said Moyer. “If we want to control what happens to our byline, that’s the company telling us that we need to form a union. So, hey, let’s do it.”
Last month, all seven of the Centre Daily Times’ eligible editorial staff signed union authorization cards and submitted them to McClatchy management. On Friday, the union was voluntarily recognized by McClatchy as a bargaining unit of The NewsGuild of Greater Philadelphia, a local of The NewsGuild-CWA.
The Centre Daily Times is the first newsroom under The NewsGuild-CWA that has cited concerns about AI adoption as a top reason for unionizing, according to Jon Schleuss, the Guild’s president.
Across the U.S., unions have been on the frontline of debates over the ethics and standards of AI adoption in journalism. Currently, 74 established newsroom units represented by The NewsGuild-CWA, the largest news worker union in the country, include some AI language in their union contracts. In a statement, Schleuss said that McClatchy’s unionized newsrooms, especially those with ratified contracts, have had greater leverage and control over how the CSA tool is used.
“Unionized newsrooms are the ones where McClatchy’s AI slop gets a clear label. In non-union newsrooms, the AI slop may be carrying a real human reporter’s byline,” he said.
Byline strikes have already taken place at more than a half-dozen McClatchy publications, including The Miami Herald, The Modesto Bee, and The Tacoma News Tribune. Last month, The Idaho Statesman, a McClatchy-owned paper in Boise, launched a day-long work strike to protest low wages and mandated use of the CSA tool. The Centre Daily Times formed its union to earn new negotiating power and worker protections, and potentially gain access to these types of labor actions for the first time.
Beyond control over how reporter bylines are used on AI-generated content, the Centre Daily Times staffers told me their union drive also reflects concerns about inflation-related wage increases and the more general threat of AI-related layoffs.
“Some of us use AI a lot more, and are okay with it. Others try to use it as little as possible, but there is an overall understanding that we need to be able to have a say in this, and that unionizing at least gives us a seat at the table,” said Trebor Maitin, a service reporter at the Centre Daily Times. “McClatchy is going through a rough time — the whole industry is. We don’t want to be the ones first on the chopping block, because we’re a non-union newsroom, and they can just replace us with AI if they so chose.”
McClatchy did not respond to requests for comment.
“She said this change was announced literally an hour ago in the channel for supervisors and [the reason] was we want reporters to feel confident about the accuracy of each version before publication,” Maitin told me. “Thus, everyone publishing should follow this format in the credit line: ‘reporting by name of reporter, produced with AI assistance.’”
Maitin thought the reason given at the time, that reporters would work harder to address error and accuracy issues if their name appeared in the byline, was disingenuous.
“The most important thing to me is the audience. We serve our readers. When our names go on a thing, it says that this article or video, whatever you’re about to consume, is from that person, but that is just not true in this case,” said Maitin, who called the byline format “almost misleading.” “We know that means that we didn’t actually write the thing, but I’m not certain that the average reader would.”
Concerns about the CSA bylines escalated further in April. That month the McClatchy-owned Wichita Eagle began publishing CSA-produced stories with only reporters’ names, and no language indicating they had been drafted with AI assistance. The move showed that McClatchy’s threshold for AI disclosure might continue to shift.
Despite concerns raised by reporters during editorial meetings and town halls, no changes were made to the byline policy, and reporters’ names continued to run without their consent. That was when unionized newsrooms in McClatchy’s network began flexing the “byline strike” clauses in their contracts. These labor protests have a long history in the news industry, with The Baltimore Sun most recently launching a byline strike in 2024 to protest “sliding journalistic standards.” With the rise of fully AI-generated news articles, though, this lever has new power to it.
“Over decades, reporters have engaged in byline strikes protesting many issues at several companies. [What] has felt antiquated in the digital era, however, has taken on new importance in a time when a company is attempting to put real reporters’ names on AI-generated slop,” said Schleuss, The NewsGuild-CWA president.
For Maitin’s part, he will not be around to see a contract at the Centre Daily Times ratified. He is leaving this month for a new role with Report for America. He does not shy away from saying that his decision was influenced by concerns that his name would be associated with stories produced by the CSA tool.
“I put my name on things that I ostensibly believe in and stand by,” he told me. “I’m not going to be working on this paper, but in the future, a prospective employer might look at my staff page and see all this AI-generated content. I don’t think that makes me look very good, and I don’t think that makes our paper look good.”
