Newspaper Chain's Reporters Withhold Their Bylines to Protest 'AI-Assisted' Articles

Source: Slashdot

Background

A chain of 30 U.S. newspapers—including the Sacramento Bee, the Miami Herald, and the Idaho Statesman—has started using a new AI tool that can summarize traditional articles and generate different versions for different audiences, according to the New York Times.

Reporter byline strike

Journalists in many of the company’s newsrooms are now withholding their bylines from articles created by the new tool. Those pieces run with a generic credit rather than an individual reporter’s name and are labeled AI‑assisted.

“We don’t want to put our bylines on stories we did not actually write even if they’re based on our work,” said Ariane Lange, an investigative reporter at the Sacramento Bee and vice chair of the Sacramento Bee News Guild. “That in itself feels like a lie.”

The byline strike represents one of the sharpest conflicts yet between journalists and their employers over AI use. Executives have promoted the tool internally as a way to increase the number of articles published and attract new subscribers. Eric Nelson, vice president of local news, explained that attaching reporters’ bylines to AI‑generated articles was intended to convey “authority” to Google so the stories would rank higher in search results. He also noted that the company is experimenting with feeding reporters’ notes into the AI to create articles.

“Journalists who embrace and experiment with this tool are going to win,” Nelson said in a meeting. “Journalists who are defiant will fall behind.”

Company policy

McClatchy’s public AI policy states that the company uses AI tools to summarize articles to “help readers quickly understand the main points of a single story or catch up on multiple stories about a larger topic.” The policy also requires editors to review AI‑generated output before publication.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.