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A LinkedIn message arrived with an unusual subject line: “Licensing newsroom archives—paid.” It was sent by a “data procurement worker” for a company called Handshake, which describes itself as a “job search platform.” The message read, “Hi Jules. Odd approach, but a real one. Handshake licenses genuine professional documents to test how well AI handles actual knowledge work.”

I wondered what such a request could possibly have to do with me, so I read on, and learned that Handshake was seeking “one story followed all the way through, rather than published articles alone.” The company would be happy to pay for documents related to journalism work, including “the pitch, reporting notes, interview transcripts, FOIA responses and source documents, the successive drafts, the editor’s markup, the published piece, and any correction that followed. That progression—draft to published to correction—is the single most useful thing a newsroom holds for us.”

Something about that last line rubbed me the wrong way. But, intrigued, I replied asking for details. Within two hours, a response arrived in my inbox. Each set of reporting documents would be considered a “case,” the message explained, and each case needed to have at least fifty documents, three file types, and a variety of document lengths. Handshake offered a thousand dollars per case. Would I like to schedule a meeting? 

Ethically, I could see no reason to take the deal. The journalism industry has been running toward AI—at journalists’ expense, it would seem—and I don’t like the idea of contributing to technology that is constantly working to replace me. But as a journalist, I couldn’t resist the temptation of finding out more. I scheduled the meeting for that Friday morning.

To train a large language model, AI companies need two things: data, which the model uses to “learn” how to recognize and predict patterns, and people to evaluate how well it’s doing at that task. (An LLM designed to recognize cancer cells in medical imaging, for example, will have different training data and goals for pattern recognition than one designed to analyze financial statements.) The work usually involves detailed analysis of a model’s outputs. A recent AI job listing for “journalist” seeks a trainer to “evaluate AI-generated news stories…for quality and accuracy” and to “review journalistic scenarios involving story selection, source evaluation, fact interpretation, and presentation choices.” The pay is offered at up to a hundred and ten dollars per hour. 

Handshake AI is one of a growing number of platforms that hire contractors to train and evaluate LLMs. It was founded in 2014 as Handshake, a job-search platform aimed at college students; in 2025, it added a division to recruit for AI-training jobs, which hit a billion dollars in gross revenue within fifteen months. It works with eight AI labs and claims a talent pool of more than seven hundred and fifty thousand people. Handshake’s CEO, Garrett Lord, told Time magazine recently that Handshake helps LLMs parse “the messiness of the real world.” 

But now it seems Handshake isn’t just paying for training—it’s paying for content that can be fed into an LLM. Stephen Rocco Rodi, Handshake’s chief communications officer, confirmed to me that the LinkedIn message I’d received was from the company’s “document licensing program,” which it started because “models have gotten very good at the finished product and are still weak at the work behind it, the drafts, the notes, the judgment calls a professional makes on the way to the answer. Most of that knowledge lives with individual practitioners, and today it reaches AI systems either secondhand or not at all. We think the people who hold that expertise should be the ones who decide whether it’s used, and should be paid when it is.”

At 10am on the appointed Friday, I logged in to a Handshake Zoom session with a list of questions I wasn’t sure I would get answers to. But the data specialist, a man in his late twenties, greeted me with a monotone voice and asked what I wanted to know. 

Our conversation lasted all of six minutes. I learned that the project wasn’t journalism-specific. Handshake was looking for documents not only from journalists, but also from producers, directors, engineers, accountants, and managers representing a variety of fields. (Rodi declined to confirm target specifics.)

Importantly, the documents needed to contain conflicting information, so that a model could be trained to discern differences between versions. The specialist asked if I would spend ten minutes creating a folder with all of the documents I could collect and then send a screenshot of the file names. It would be best if the file names were unique, he said, since it’s hard for him to work with names like “Untitled 1” and “Untitled 2.” I said maybe. Could I see a copy of the potential contract, please? 

A few hours later, the specialist sent me a draft contract, which said that, although I would retain ownership of my work, I would be granting Handshake a “non-exclusive…royalty-free, fully paid up, perpetual, irrevocable, transferable and sublicensable license” to my documents. 

Afterward, to get some context on deals like these, I contacted Justin Nelson—a partner at the law firm Susman Godfrey who served as co–lead counsel for the plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit brought by book authors and publishers against Anthropic, which resulted in a 1.5-billion-dollar copyright settlement. In plain language, Nelson said, the Handshake contract meant “you are giving them free ability to do whatever they want with it forever. How much is that worth to you?”

To me, it’s not worth potentially damaging a career relationship. I was curious how an editor would perceive this type of licensing deal, or whether they’d want to work with someone who took it. So I also asked Andy Downing, my editor at Matter News, a local nonprofit outlet in Columbus, Ohio. Downing and I have worked together for the past year on a monthly local politics column and various features. Our pieces have involved lots of interview transcripts, records requests, outlines, drafts, edits, and invoices—perfect fodder for a thousand-dollar licensing deal. 

Downing said that, legally speaking, taking the Handshake deal probably wouldn’t be a breach of my contract. I give Matter News first publication rights for my articles, but those rights eventually become nonexclusive and, as a freelancer, I own all the work that goes into the writing.

But he would consider it a serious breach of trust with the people I interview. “You have to do their story justice, and that doesn’t end when the piece is published,” he said. “You don’t own the rights to that story to then sell for your own profit. That whole aspect of it is just really galling to me.”

Downing said he was sure there would be people—or companies—who would take a deal like this, especially given the precarity of freelance life. But I wasn’t one of them. I wrote to the specialist, about a week after Handshake’s first message to me, to say that I would not be participating.

When I asked Nelson what he thought of the licensing deal I was offered, he did point out one upside. “At least they’re trying to ask permission,” he said. “I think it’s a recognition that they really shouldn’t be taking this material for free.”

This piece was produced with support from the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security.

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