A major newspaper chain is pivoting to AI-created articles. How this small newspaper’s staff is fighting back
People interested in visiting the Pennsylvania Military Museum over the long Memorial Day weekend were out of luck. As the facility undergoes renovations, an article in the Centre Daily Times newspaper notes, museum visitors “will find the doors still shut.”
The most peculiar part of the article — consisting primarily of “key takeaways” presented in a bulleted list — had nothing to do with the state-owned museum or its delayed renovations. It was its byline, which noted the story was reported by journalist Josh Moyer and “produced with AI assistance.”
As news organizations nationwide experiment with artificial intelligence to improve efficiency and cut costs, Moyer and other reporters at the daily newspaper in State College, Pennsylvania, are going to war with their new robot colleagues. Earlier this month, they announced plans to unionize.
“We’re seeking a fairer and more equitable contract, and one of our priorities is having greater control of our bylines when it comes to AI-produced content,” Moyer said in an email. “The Centre Daily Times has been a great place to work, and we’re working to make it better.”
The effort was lauded by one of the nation’s leading media ethicists, who told Straight Arrow that rank-and-file journalists deserve a seat at the table as outlets innovate.
The union effort in State College is just one of the ways employees of newspaper publisher McClatchy Media have resisted a new effort that places human reporters’ bylines on articles written by artificial intelligence.
The effort could help shape the future of the news — and the role of the journalists in gathering and presenting the news.
“Everything’s happened pretty fast,” Moyer told Straight Arrow. Journalists at the newspaper contacted the NewsGuild of Greater Philadelphia on May 1 about their interest in forming a union.
Two weeks later, all seven reporters at the Centre Daily Times asked McClatchy to voluntarily recognize their collective bargaining bid.
Representatives at McClatchy and the Centre Daily Times didn’t respond to Straight Arrow’s requests for comment.
Kelly McBride, the senior vice president at the nonprofit Poynter Institute and a leading media ethicist, told Straight Arrow that McClatchy’s writers weren’t given sufficient opportunity to provide input into the company’s AI use. As a result, the company’s relationship with its staff “is spiraling.”
“As a writer I take great pride in the human fingerprint of my work,” McBride said. “And so I think the response from the human writers is a natural and expected one.”
How are newsrooms using AI?
Central to the union drive at the Centre Daily Times is the “Content Scaling Agent,” an AI-powered tool that uses Anthropic’s Claude chatbot to repackage news articles at varying lengths for different audiences.
The State College newsroom was an “early test newsroom” for the tool, according to a NewGuild blog post. At first, the chatbot-generated posts carried a “generic AI staff” byline until February, when the outlet began placing human journalists’ names on AI-generated articles.
McClatchy has pitched the content scaling tool as a way to save time and produce content relevant to readers in formats that work best for them. Eric Nelson, the company’s vice president of local news, pitched the tool as a way to help reporters find “new audiences, angles and entry points,” according to The Wrap. McClatchy-owned newspapers include the Kansas City Star, the Sacramento Bee, the Miami Herald and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas.
Reporters at McClatchy papers, meanwhile, say the tool has actually cost them time as they work to fix errors introduced by AI. Some of the chain’s highest-profile writers have refused to play along. Among them is Julie K. Brown, a Miami Herald investigative reporter who was recently awarded a Pulitzer Prize special citation for groundbreaking reporting into child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his “powerful network of associates and enablers.”
“I cover sensitive stories that should never be repackaged or altered in any way by artificial intelligence,” Brown wrote on X this month. “Whether the story is about sexual abuse or immigrants caged at Alligator Alcatraz, our journalists take great care to ensure that their material is accurate, fair and conveys invaluable aspects of humanity that AI simply can’t do.”
Newsrooms rolling out AI-powered tools include The Associated Press and USA Today, which has an “AI Overview” tool that summarizes articles and allows readers to “ask USA TODAY anything.”
Straight Arrow uses AI to help produce features such as Media Miss and Media Landscape, which analyze coverage from multiple news outlets. However, editors review all AI content, and AI is never used to write news articles.
Are unions the answer?
As newspaper outlets increasingly seek to integrate AI into their workflows, it’s become a primary point of union negotiation, said Bill Ross, the executive director of The NewsGuild of Greater Philadelphia. As journalists in State College seek new AI guardrails, Ross said the union is “very eager to sit down and start bargaining” with management.
“We’re seeing it not only in McClatchy newspapers, we’re seeing it elsewhere,” Ross said. “Clearly other chains are using a version of this where a story clearly says it’s written by AI but handed to a NewsGuild member to edit and then put their byline on it. So we’re dealing with it.” Meanwhile, Poynter’s McBride said unionizing is a “blunt instrument” that should be used as a last resort.
“Especially in a state like Pennsylvania, which is a pro-union state, it can be very effective,” McBride told Straight Arrow. “It can also backfire, especially in a small news organization because a big corporation can do some pretty draconian things.”
But unions have also played a pivotal role in recent newsroom debates around AI. At The New York Times, editorial union leaders criticized the company’s AI standards as “woefully inadequate” and vague after the newspaper cut ties with a freelance writer who used AI to write a book review that appeared eerily similar to an article in The Guardian. Meanwhile, at the nonprofit investigative news outlet ProPublica, some 150 union members went on a 24-hour strike last month as they sought contract language to ban newsroom layoffs tied to AI adoption.
McBride and her Poynter colleagues created a model AI ethics guidebook for newsrooms that recommends the creation of AI committees with diverse perspectives. The policy also calls for “human verification” of all AI-generated content to ensure accuracy. Permitted AI uses under the model guidebook include the production of article summaries, for “headline experimentation” and for research.
“I believe in unions, but when it comes to negotiating uses of new technology, I think there are other ways to do it,” McBride said. “It’s not the first thing that I would do as a staffer if I had lots of other options available to me.”
Round out your reading
- Tennessee officials will pay $835,000 for jailing man over Charlie Kirk meme.
- Why the immune system turns on women more often than men.
- More than 340 newspapers block the Wayback Machine. What that means for the future of the internet.
- Why Rep. Cohen filed articles of impeachment against Supreme Court Justice John Roberts.
- We’re building a new Straight Arrow. Help us shape our future by taking our survey.
Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
