McClatchy, the newspaper chain behind publications including The Sacramento Bee, The Miami Herald and The Idaho Statesman, has begun using a new artificial intelligence tool that can summarize traditional articles and spit out different versions for different audiences.
Its journalists are not happy about it.
Journalists in many of the company’s newsrooms now withhold their bylines from articles created by the new tool, meaning those articles will run with a generic credit instead of a reporter’s name, as is customary. They are also labeled AI assisted.
“We don’t want to put our bylines on stories we didn’t actually write, even if they’re based on our work,” said Ariane Lange, an investigative reporter at The Sacramento Bee and vice president of The Sacramento Bee News Guild. “That in itself feels like a lie.”
The journalists’ byline strike is one of the sharpest conflicts so far between journalists and their companies over the use of AI. Related debates are playing out in newsrooms across the country as publishers experiment with new AI tools to streamline work that used to take hours, and some are even using it to write entire articles.
Many journalists are adamant about having guardrails in place for the use of artificial intelligence in reporting and producing news.
McClatchy’s new tool, which it developed in-house and calls the Content Scaling Agent, is being used to some degree in all of McClatchy’s newsrooms, according to a person briefed on the rollout. McClatchy, which was sold to hedge fund Chatham Asset Management in 2020 after it declared 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 employees at a March 17 meeting, 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.”
Mr. Nelson said the use of journalists’ bylines on the AI-generated articles was a way to show “authority” on Google so that the search engine would rank the articles higher in results. He also said the company was experimenting with loading reporter’s notes to create articles.
“Journalists who embrace and experiment with this tool will win,” said Mr. Nelson at the meeting. “Journalists who are defiant will fall behind.”
An AI-generated article in The Miami Herald on Wednesday about a court ruling in favor of a cancer patient is one example. It was credited with a byline that read: “Produced using AI, based on original work by Michelle Marchante.” A footnote said the article had been produced “using a proprietary tool powered by artificial intelligence and using our own originally reported, written and published content. It was reviewed and edited by our journalists.”
The Wrap previously reported on the internal tensions at McClatchy.
McClatchy’s public AI policy says 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 larger topic,” and that editors review the output before publication.
Journalists at several McClatchy newspapers said they had been troubled by the lack of clear answers surrounding the use of the tool, as well as the use of their names on AI-generated versions. They said their union contracts also required the company to give notice before introducing major technological changes.
Journalists at the various papers have informed management of their byline strike in separate letters at different times in recent weeks. The 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 at 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 artificial intelligence with its reporters or with 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 editorial management by members of The Sacramento Bee News Guild on March 27, reporters 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 journalists are asked to edit summaries of AI, we are asked to take time away from 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 Scaling Agent constituted an “ethical breach.”
“Despite executives’ claims that ‘CSA’ will save us and that subscribers will continue to pay for a product filled with AI-generated replays, we see this as nothing more than a race to the bottom,” the letter said.
