McClatchy, the newspaper chain behind publications like The Sacramento Bee, The Miami Herald and The Idaho Statesman, has started using a new artificial intelligence tool that can summarize traditional articles and spit out different versions for different audiences.
Your journalists are not happy about this.
Journalists in many of the company’s newsrooms now hide their signatures on articles created with the new tool, meaning those articles will appear with a generic credit instead of a journalist’s name, as is usual. They are also labeled as AI-assisted.
“We don’t want to put our byline on stories we didn’t actually write, even if they’re based on our work,” said Ariane Lange, investigative reporter for The Sacramento Bee and vice president of The Sacramento Bee News Guild. “That in itself seems like a lie.”
The reporters’ signature strike is one of the most acute conflicts so far between journalists and their companies over the use of AI. Related debates are playing out in newsrooms across the country, as editors experiment with new AI tools to streamline work that once took hours, and some even use it to write entire articles.
Many journalists are adamant about establishing guardrails for the use of AI in reporting and news production.
McClatchy’s new tool, which it developed in-house and calls Content Scaling Agent, is being used to some extent in all of McClatchy’s newsrooms, according to a person briefed on the launch. McClatchy, which was sold to hedge fund Chatham Asset Management in 2020 after filing for bankruptcy, operates 30 newspapers in 14 states.
A representative for McClatchy did not respond to requests for comment. But executives have promoted the tool internally as a way to increase the number of articles published and ultimately gain new subscribers.
“We need more stories and we need more inventory,” Eric Nelson, vice president of local news, told staff members at a meeting on March 17, according to a transcript reviewed by The New York Times. “This is a tool where we can take our strong content and find new audiences, angles and entry points.”
Nelson said using journalists’ signatures on AI-generated articles was a way to show “authority” to Google so the search engine would rank articles higher in results. He also said the company was experimenting with incorporating journalists’ notes to create articles.
“Journalists who embrace and experiment with this tool are going to win,” Nelson said at the meeting. “Defiant journalists will be left behind.”
An example of this is an AI-generated article in The Miami Herald on Wednesday about a court ruling in favor of a cancer patient. A byline was attributed to him that read: “Produced with AI, based on the original work of Michelle Marchante.” A footnote said the article had been produced “with the help of a proprietary tool powered by artificial intelligence and using our own content originally reported, written and published. It was reviewed and edited by our journalists.”
The Wrap previously reported on internal tensions at McClatchy.
McClatchy’s AI public policy states that the company uses AI tools to summarize articles to “help readers quickly understand the main points of a single story or catch up on multiple stories on a broader topic,” and that editors review the result before publication.
Journalists at several McClatchy newspapers said they had been alarmed by the lack of clear answers about the use of the tool, as well as the use of their names in the AI-generated versions. They said their union contracts also required the company to give notice before introducing major technological changes.
The journalists of the different newspapers have informed the management of their strike in separate letters, at different times in recent weeks. Newsrooms involved include The Sacramento Bee, The Miami Herald, The Modesto Bee, The Bradenton Herald, The Tacoma News Tribune, The Bellingham Herald, The Olympian, Tri-City Herald and The Idaho Statesman.
More than 65 unionized employees of The Miami Herald and The Bradenton Herald said in a letter to management Thursday that their contract prohibits the company from using their bylines without reporters’ consent. They said McClatchy had not been transparent about its use of generative AI with its reporters or readers.
“Filling our newspapers and websites with AI-generated content damages the relationships journalists build in our communities for a truly sustainable newsroom,” they wrote.
In a letter sent to newsroom leaders by members of The Sacramento Bee News Guild on March 27, journalists noted that while the content scaling agent was intended to increase the number of articles published, there was no planned increase in the number of editors.
“When AI asks journalists to edit summaries, we are being asked to take time to engage in serious journalism,” the letter said.
The Washington State News Guild, which represents employees at newspapers such as The Olympian and The Tacoma News Tribune, told management last Friday that the content escalation agent amounted to an “ethical violation.”
“Despite executives’ claims that the ‘CSA’ will save us and that subscribers will continue to pay for a product rife with AI-generated repetition, we view this as nothing more than a race to the bottom,” that letter said.
