After more than two years of stalled contract negotiations, ProPublica journalists walked off the job Wednesday in a newsroom-wide strike.
An unexpected issue is at the heart of the dispute: How much of ProPublica’s work can be off-loaded to artificial intelligence.
In recent years, newsrooms around the country have begun contending with what role AI can — and should — play in their journalism. In Ohio, the Cleveland’s Plain Dealer is publishing articles that have been drafted by AI. Fortune and Business Insider are also using AI to write full articles, while other news outlets are using AI for tasks like trawling through heaps of data and suggesting headlines.
But how AI will fit in at ProPublica, which specializes in deeply reported investigative journalism and has won eight Pulitzers, is less clear. But the newsroom’s inclusion in the battle over AI is a sign of the issue’s resonance throughout the journalism industry as the technology spreads and editors in big and small newsrooms come under pressure to find ways to work more efficiently.
ProPublica’s union asked the outlet to commit to not replacing jobs with AI and to allow staffers to have a say in how AI is used in the newsroom, said Mark Olalde, a ProPublica reporter and member of the union’s bargaining committee.
“We’re not trying to say, ‘No, we don’t want to use technology.’ What we’re trying to say is we want to use technology ethically, efficiently and in a way that will preserve the accuracy and quality of our work,” Olalde said. “It’s something that management has really dug in on in a head-scratching way.”
Outside ProPublica’s Washington bureau on Wednesday, a few blocks from the White House, about a dozen ProPublica staffers braved brisk spring temperatures to protest the protracted negotiations, which have lasted 28 months since the outlet first unionized in 2023. Besides wanting a say in how AI will be implemented at the acclaimed newsroom, staffers said the union is also fighting for layoff protections and wage increases.
J. David McSwane, a ProPublica reporter who covers civil rights, said it’s especially surprising that negotiations have been so drawn out at a mission-driven nonprofit. “The sentiment that I often hear is that it seems antithetical to what ProPublica is,” McSwane said.
McSwane said he understands that AI can be an effective tool in reporting. “But we do really deep, nuanced work. It requires skill and expertise. We have a lot of that, and we want to make sure that those humans who have dedicated themselves to the craft are behind the steering wheel,” he added. “AI can’t go and knock on someone’s door, as I often do.”
In an emailed statement, ProPublica spokesperson Alexis Stephens said the news outlet has never had layoffs in its 18-year history and that it is “committed to reaching a fair and sustainable first contract.” Stephens added that the union’s complaints about ProPublica’s AI policy were “unfounded.”
“It’s too soon to know exactly how AI will affect our work. Rather than make promises we can’t responsibly keep, we are exploring how these technologies can create more space for investigative reporting and thinking deeply and creatively, not less,” Stephens said.
ProPublica’s AI policy says that any work done with the help of AI is reviewed by journalists and disclosed to readers. Olalde said the union agrees with the policy’s principles but wants them included in their contract.
On Monday, the union filed an unfair-labor-practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board against ProPublica over policy, accusing the news outlet of failing to bargain with the union before rolling it out.
Susan DeCarava, president of the NewsGuild of New York, said discord over AI is playing out in every newsroom the union represents. Besides ProPublica, the NewsGuild of New York also represents unions at outlets including the New York Times, Time magazine, the Marshall Project and Reuters.
“It can’t be the Wild West. It’s got to be clear what our values are that are guiding the engagement with this technology, because the implications for journalism are huge,” DeCarava said.
DeCarava added that how ProPublica handles AI is particularly important because it’s one of the country’s largest nonprofit newsrooms. “It sets a standard, certainly, for investigative journalism,” she said.
But AI is not always an impasse, according to DeCarava. She pointed to the nonprofit California news site CalMatters, which in 2025 reached a contract that includes AI safeguards, including that no employee’s position can be replaced by the technology.
However, at the Sacramento Bee, the McClatchy-owned newspaper in California’s capital, more than 30 journalists this week signed a letter protesting their parent company’s new tool that rewrites published articles to target niche audiences.
“We’re concerned that the quality of the entire newspaper will suffer, that our editors won’t have enough time to thoroughly review AI-generated stories, which may be inaccurate because they’re generated by a tool that doesn’t know fact from fiction,” said Ariane Lange, an investigative reporter at the Bee. McClatchy did not respond to a request for comment.
Despite her frustrations, ProPublica reporter Kirsten Berg, who took part in the Washington protest on Wednesday, said she has faith that the outlet isn’t trying to replace reporters with AI.
“They want us to trust the editors and trust management, and we want management to trust us — that we know what’s best for our journalism,” Berg said.
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