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Over the summer, journalists at McClatchy battled with management over the company’s plans to use artificial intelligence—and union members, organized in several regional guilds, largely seemed to be making headway. In July, newspapers in Washington State and Idaho ratified a union contract with significant AI provisions, including ones preventing the company from using AI to replace staff, using AI to impersonate journalists, or disciplining members for a chatbot’s mistakes. A month later, journalists at the Centre Daily Times, in State College, Pennsylvania, unionized and ratified an agreement that included AI protections, allowing journalists to withhold bylines from AI-assisted stories without fear of being penalized. The gains happened in just a few short months.
Then, last week, McClatchy laid off more than ninety unionized media workers across seventeen publications, according to the NewsGuild, making these hard-won agreements look like drops in a bucket that had just been tipped over. The cuts affected each newsroom differently—some lost three unionized reporters; others lost eight or twelve. At the Miami Herald, where journalists had filed a grievance over McClatchy’s use of a “content scaling agent,” or CSA tool, as it’s known, twenty unionized journalists and five managers were laid off—representing roughly a quarter of the newsroom.
It remains unclear what role AI will play in McClatchy’s future. Ariane Lange, an investigative reporter at the Sacramento Bee, told me her newsroom’s union contract stipulates that the implementation of AI cannot directly lead to layoffs. But the word “directly” leaves a lot of wiggle room, she said. Though there have been no explicit indications from McClatchy about how it will factor into the next steps, “AI is clearly part of the plan moving forward,” she told me, “because it’s been part of the plan for quite some time, and the company has made huge investments in artificial intelligence products.” Representatives for McClatchy, including Greg Farmer, the executive vice president for local news, didn’t respond to a request for an interview or details about their plans for AI use.
Journalists are keeping watch. Bryan Clark, an opinion columnist at the Idaho Statesman who was laid off last week, said that if the company does make use of AI to make up for the loss of laid-off journalists, it would be a very clear violation of the union contract. “We’ll be monitoring that very closely,” he said. “Our contract is very explicit. They cannot replace union work with AI. If there’s any attempt to do that, we’re going to be at the arbitration table very quickly.”
At the Statesman, ten of twenty-two guild members were laid off. “It’s going to have a crippling impact on the kind of information that is available to people in Idaho, in Boise in particular, if these layoffs stand,” Clark said. He and others at the Statesman are hoping, maybe against hope, that the company will bring people back. “We’ve been getting a lot of support from the community,” he told me. “We’ve definitely been hearing from a lot of subscribers who are wanting to know how they can help, how they can help reverse it.”
The AI battle has been brewing for some time. In January of this year, McClatchy journalists spoke to CJR about changes they noticed as the company embraced AI, including stories repackaged by AI with subtle changes for different audiences and the rollout of AI-created listicles. By April, journalists across McClatchy publications were fighting the use of the CSA tool, powered by Anthropic’s Claude, to repackage stories under their bylines. At some papers, including the Sacramento Bee and the Miami Herald, reporters began withholding their bylines from CSA stories. At one point, the CSA tool resulted in an error in an article published by the Bee—about sexual assault allegations against Eric Swalwell—which CJR reported in May. A change was made to the article without a correction.
In 2024, McClatchy acquired Trend Hunter, a company that uses AI to examine consumer trends and generate articles about them—with headlines such as “What Your Poop Color, Shape and Frequency Say About Your Gut Health According to Doctors”—published on McClatchy websites. The disclosure at the bottom of those articles reads: “This article was created by content specialists using various tools, including AI.”
Journalists at the Herald and at the Idaho Statesman said they haven’t noticed an uptick in AI content recently—on the contrary, some wonder if AI-fueled experiments have decreased. Following the layoffs, none of the McClatchy reporters I spoke with told me that they had guidance on whether reporters will be expected to cover additional beats or how McClatchy expects to move forward. “We long ago cut past the skin and the bone and the muscle and the tendons and the ligaments,” Carol Marbin Miller, the Herald’s deputy investigations editor, wrote on X. “We are now slicing out the vital organs, such as coverage of the cities of Miami and Miami Beach. How can you cover Miami without a Miami reporter?”
The journalists remaining at McClatchy papers—and those who’ve been laid off—are left to wonder how AI will fill the gaps. Clark told me that he and other reporters have been given no signal that the recent union AI wins and the layoffs are related, but “we’re still looking around,” he said. “If there is any connection, we’re going to find out about it.”
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