When it came to using their names, journalists at the Sacramento Bee drew a line in the sand against their newsroom’s latest AI tool.
More than 30 staffers in the paper’s union sent a letter to Bee management on March 27 stating they would withhold their bylines from stories created by their parent company McClatchy’s “content scaling agent,” a generative AI product that produces new pieces using the reporters’ existing work.
“We don’t want the public to think we have anything to do with it,” Ariane Lange, an investigative reporter at the Bee and the vice chair of its union, told TheWrap. “We think it’s a betrayal of the public’s trust, and it undermines our credibility, and also it’s frankly kind of insulting they’re asking us to be hacks.”
The “content scaling agent,” which Lange said has been promoted by management as a way to boost the outlet’s traffic and productivity, allows Bee editors to produce summarized and repurposed versions of its reporters’ work under new headlines. Lange said editors can use the tool to produce versions of stories geared toward specific audiences, as well as roundups of multiple stories.
McClatchy, the 168-year-old newspaper chain behind prominent, Pulitzer Prize-winning local outlets like the Bee, the Miami Herald and the Charlotte Observer, began deploying the tool last month across a number of its 30 markets. While no story has run with a reporter’s byline at the Bee, the deployment of the “content scaling agent” is the latest development in McClatchy’s increasing adoption of generative AI, following its yearslong use of AI-generated summaries. The company’s embrace of AI has spurred disputes with unions representing some McClatchy employees and has rankled staffers elsewhere.
The uproar inside McClatchy comes as newsrooms wrestle with how best to incorporate this transformative technology into workflows while upholding journalistic standards. Business Insider has experimented with publishing AI-generated stories (with a human editor) while a Fortune editor — the subject of a much-discussed Wall Street Journal profile — has cranked out more than 600 articles in eight months using AI. The top editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer has advocated using AI to draft reporters’ stories, while Axios’ leadership framed efficient AI usage last month as a “moonshot” to propel the company forward.
In recent years, news organizations have leveraged AI to aid in investigative journalism, using the technology to analyze large data sets or produce visualizations, as well as to help hold lawmakers accountable, as evidenced by Cal Matters’ Digital Democracy tool.
But the misuse of AI has also led to unreliable and sometimes bogus stories, heightening concerns about credibility and job security. The New York Times’ contract negotiations with its union stalled earlier this year over AI, and ProPublica’s union authorized a strike last month partly over management’s refusal to agree to a ban on AI-related layoffs.
Gina Chua, the Executive Director of the Tow-Knight Center at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, told TheWrap that while AI can present several applications for journalists to report more efficiently, there remains a “spectrum” of concerns for reporters, ranging from how they’re serving their communities to how long they hold their jobs. As companies adopt the technology, they should consider the impact on how audiences discover and engage with the information produced by AI.
For a company to implement a whole new process, Chua said, history shows that it’s better to do it with employee buy-in rather than impose it on reluctant staffers. “Change is always difficult,” she said.
“When you need to make changes, you have to find ways to move people along,” she added.
From a public perception perspective, a Pew Research survey from last year found that 51% of people felt AI would negatively impact the news we get, with outlets flirting with breaking the trust they have with readers with even a single misstep.
“Our managers describe this to us as an experiment,” Lange, the Bee reporter, said, “and we responded, ‘Yeah, it is an experiment, and the imperiled guinea pig is our credibility.’”
A McClatchy spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about the tool or make any executives available to discuss its use.
Inside the rollout
McClatchy started a quiet rollout of the content scaling agent earlier this year at several papers, including the Herald and the Centre Daily Times in Pennsylvania, summarizing stories using the tool while linking to the full story within the text. The tool was eventually rolled out to more newsrooms; a Charlotte Observer editor demonstrated the tool in a March 18 meeting with staff, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The labeling of the tool may vary from paper to paper, apparently dependent on union agreements, Lange said. At the Herald, where the union contract outlines reporters’ control over their bylines, stories were labeled as “produced using AI based on original work by” the reporter whose story was summarized. The Daily Times, which is not unionized, has cited “reporting by” the reporters of the original story, though the story itself was “produced with AI assistance.”
Lange said she first heard about the Bee’s use of the agent on March 20 when she learned some of her colleagues had been asked to work on the tool. The Sacramento Bee’s union that same day asked for a meeting with management, believing its top editors had violated a contract provision that required advance notice of a new generative AI tool.
But as the paper’s executive editor Chris Fusco and Scott Lebar met with teams to discuss the tool and take questions about it, the fear that it could undermine the paper’s credibility persisted, prompting 31 journalists in the paper’s 35-member union to send the March 27 letter to management invoking another contract provision that allows a reporter to withhold their byline from a story in advance if they protest its use.
Fusco met with the Bee’s union leaders, including Lange, on April 1 to affirm the paper would not add a reporter’s byline to stories produced using the tool and instead spoke about byline alternatives. The two sides also discussed an alternative where reporters could write another story themselves, Lange said.
One March 31 story ran with a byline label “edited by Sacramento Bee staff” and “produced with AI assistance.”
Lange said she appreciated Fusco’s adherence to the union’s contract, but such an action alone did not address Bee staffers’ larger concerns over McClatchy’s AI adoption.
“On some level, it is a fight,” she said.
McClatchy’s AI embrace
The local news giant has adopted some form of automation to produce journalism over the last several years.
It introduced the “Miami Herald Bot” in 2021 to write stories about home purchases on Miami’s sprawling real-estate beat, and it later developed another bot that produced hurricane-related stories. After advancements in generative AI technology in 2022, McClatchy leaned in further by producing AI summaries of stories that didn’t necessarily require reporters’ bylines, such as a Bee story from June last year that compiled ongoing housing projects in the city.
McClatchy’s page outlining how it uses AI, last updated in spring 2025, lists five applications: boosting workflow, data analysis, AI-generated stories on basic data like weather and traffic, summarizing stories and how stories are displayed on their websites. The company said all work using AI is reviewed by humans first.
McClatchy staffers are also encouraged to use internal AI tools to help them write headlines optimized for search engines, said Michael Lycklama, a high school sports reporter at the Idaho Statesman, which is not currently using the content scaling agent. Nearly all of McClatchy’s reporting job listings also demand candidates know how to “leverage AI tools” for help in “finding efficiencies” as they report.
“It seems to kind of just be AI for AI’s sake,” said Lycklama, the chair of the Statesman’s union. “Anytime we ask, ‘Well, how do we know this is working?’ and, ‘What even is working?’ we can’t really get an answer.”
Some AI tools McClatchy has used have also been found to plagiarize. Nota, an AI company contracted by McClatchy, scrapped its network of local news websites last week after Poynter reported that it had mistakenly scraped content from some of Nota’s clients, including the McClatchy-owned Kansas City Star.
McClatchy’s AI adoption also sparked some union fights. The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, which is negotiating a union contract on behalf of the Statesman and a collection of newspapers in Washington state, battled McClatchy earlier this year over the company’s desire to produce AI-generated stories without human involvement and retain the right to create AI impersonations of reporters — or “deepfakes” — for photos, podcasts and videos.
Bryan Clark, an opinion editor at the Statesman and the vice president of the PNW Newspaper Guild, told TheWrap the union had reached a tentative agreement with McClatchy on an AI clause that prevented deepfakes and demanded human involvement if AI content relies “substantially” on a reporter’s work. Such language would also likely limit the content scaling agent’s deployment at the Guild’s McClatchy-owned papers, Clark said, acknowledging the union’s “concerns” with the tool.
“What it consistently said in negotiations was it wanted to maintain as much flexibility as possible for this emerging technology,” Clark said about the AI negotiations. “We thought there were lines in the sand that should be non-negotiable matters of basic journalistic ethics and things like that, and I think we were largely successful.”
Where it goes
While the PNW Newspaper Guild has struck new AI protections, concerns about AI still exist within Sacramento’s borders — and beyond.
Members of the Charlotte Observer’s union met with newsroom leaders last week to address staff concerns with the tool, according to a person familiar with the matter, and both sides established that Observer reporters’ use of the tool is optional. Union leaders at the Miami Herald’s union are also discussing concerns about the tool’s impact on the newsroom, according to another person familiar with the matter.
Lange, the Sacramento Bee union vice chair, said her newsroom isn’t entirely opposed to the use of AI in cases where it appears ethical.
But she said she and her colleagues worry newsroom editors may be overburdened by balancing these tools while editing reporters’ work, and she worries the agent’s presence on the website could risk damaging reporters’ relationships with their sources.
“I’ve written about some really tough things in my career — domestic violence, sexual assault, horrible traumas,” Lange said. “I don’t want to have to explain to a trauma victim that they can trust me with their story, but I cannot guarantee that it won’t be fed into a glorified chatbot.”
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