Last week all seven journalists at the Centre Daily Times in State College, Pa. asked local management to voluntarily recognize their union after McClatchy, the newspaper’s owner, began placing journalists’ bylines on stories written by artificial intelligence.
McClatchy agreed to have an independent party review the union cards signed by workers and compare that to staff lists. Six McClatchy newsrooms have unionized in as many years and each one was voluntarily recognized by the company.
McClatchy began rolling out an AI “tool” called the Content Scaling Agent (“CSA”) earlier this year. It uses Anthropic’s Claude to repackage stories at different lengths and for different audiences, according to The Wrap.
The Centre Daily Times was an early test newsroom in McCatchy’s effort to roll out CSA. Initially posts written by the AI came with a generic AI staff byline. But then that changed in February when McClatchy started putting real reporters’ names on stories created using CSA.
So in late April a handful of the journalists discussed unionizing after seeing reports that other McClatchy journalists were refusing to let the news chain put their names on posts summarized using AI.
Within two weeks, every single journalist signed a union card and asked McClatchy to recognize their union with The NewsGuild of Greater Philadelphia.
“A union is a way to say what we want and to put it in a contract,” said reporter Josh Moyer. “We’re doing this to better our newsroom, which is better for the community we cover.”
“A healthier newspaper leads to a healthier community,” he said.
Trebor Maitin, another Centre Daily Times reporter, said it’s essential for McClatchy to build trust with the newsroom so the newsroom can build trust with the community.
“Trust is the soul of journalism and if we lose that we lose everything,” Moyer said.
The company is promoting CSA as a time-saver, however, it is absorbing the time of reporters and editors who have to fix errors introduced by the model.
Many high-profile journalists, such as Miami Herald Investigative Reporter Julie K. Brown, have refused to allow McClatchy to put their name on posts summarized using AI. Brown was recognized by The Pulitzer Prizes this year for her groundbreaking reporting that exposed Jeffrey Epstein’s systematic abuse of young women.
The Centre Daily Times was founded in 1898 and is the hometown newspaper for State College, Pa. which is home to Pennsylvania State University.