USA Today Co. executives are revealing new details about a controversial deal with Palantir. In a joint interview with Fast Company’s Alex Pasternack, three executives from the country’s largest newspaper chain explained why they moved ahead with the Palantir deal despite major opposition from their own employees.
Mike Reed, the chairman and CEO of USA Today Co., previously said that the deal — first reported by Nieman Lab’s Hanaa’ Tameez — is part of a larger shift the company is making to become “an intelligence organization.” At a Palantir conference last month, Reed said that the company’s services were a way for USA Today Co. capitalize on “the shift to online and the data we have on consumers,” Pasternack reported.
In this new interview, USA Today Media president Kristin Roberts detailed some of those services for the first time:
In all of our entertainment stories and our sports stories, we do affiliate links to our partners. So if you’re reading a sports story, you want to buy the jersey for that team, our reporters and editors used to have to go to a file, find a relevant link, copy that link, put it in. All of that is now automated, and that’s a Palantir project.
Lark-Marie Anton, then a communications executive at USA Today Co., chimed in, saying that Palantir’s current scope of work is focused on audience and advertising, but in the future that could extend to social media strategy and reporting tools.
What stood out about Palantir was its ability to create what it calls an ‘ontology’ layer — essentially a unified model that allows different datasets and systems to work together and be acted upon in real time….The challenge isn’t collecting more data, but making better use of the data we already have.
In August, more than 800 USA Today Co. employees from 31 unionized newsrooms called on the company to dissolve its partnership with Palantir. In a statement, staffers named ethical issues and uncertainty over how the software would be used. Throughout the Fast Company interview, Reed and Roberts heavily criticized the NewsGuild and internal efforts to oppose the deal.
Roberts leveled the strongest criticisms of USA Today Co.’s unions across the country, going as far as to say the NewsGuild was lying to its members:
Guild leadership is saying things that are factually untrue. They prey on fear. No matter that I will appear in front of any newsroom for a standup in which they ask me anything for an hour and a half at a time, and I explain to them all of the things.
She continued:
I’ll give you an example that’s incredibly real for us. Palantir doesn’t work inside of any USA Today Company system. They don’t have access to any of the notes our reporters take. They’re not in the Microsoft suite of tools. They don’t have information directly about our consumers or our staff….They don’t work in our systems. We feed them highly controlled data. We’re in their shit. They’re not in ours.
Reed doubled down on these accusations, extending them to the work the NewsGuild has done organizing around AI in the company, including its push for clauses that would protect journalists from layoffs due to AI adoption.
“I think we’re having more success in newsrooms that are not unionized, with this new world, than those that are unionized,” Reed said.
Last month, USA Today Co. made significant layoffs across the company, including at its local newspapers, and reorganized its audience team. Reed, in a memo to staff, referenced AI-related traffic declines as a reason for the layoffs.
“USA Today Co. executives’ animosity toward their workers and unions is nothing new,” said NewsGuild president Jon Schleuss in a statement to Fast Company. “[We] fully stand behind the statement workers released when this deal with Palantir was first announced.”
You can read the full interview on Fast Company.
