The Scapegoat

McClatchy is a company that screams legacy. Nearly 170 years old, it has acquired a number of significant newspapers over the years, most notably in 2006, when it acquired the iconic Knight Ridder chain.

It is a company that has faced many challenges over its long history, notably filing for bankruptcy around the time of the COVID-19 outbreak. Even after merging with the former owner of the National Enquirer (really), it is barely holding on, and plus it has to figure out this whole AI thing.

One of my favorite metaphors is the idea of using a wrench in place of a hammer. It technically works, but it’s not the right purpose. AI tools are often the wrench of technology. And McClatchy just found its wrench.

According to The Wrap (paywall), the chain is pushing its journalists to use AI tech to repackage content in multiple directions. The technology was sold to the employees as Grammarly on steroids, and the hint seems to be that those who don’t accept this technology will be on thin ice career-wise.

“Journalists who embrace and experiment with this tool are going to win,” McClatchy VP of Local News Eric Nelson said recently, per the publication. “Journalists who are defiant will fall behind. Bottom line: We need more stories and we need more inventory.”

McClatchy is effectively using Claude to take already-written stories, repackage the reporting, and reuse it in whatever ways are necessary. Put another way, the company is trying to scale up for the arms race that is SEO, social media, and Google Discover.

The problem is, that means that these journalists are now going to have their bylines on content that AI actively wrote and repackaged, while attempting to limit the say those journalists have in the matter. From the piece:

Kathy Vetter, McClatchy’s chief of staff for local news, said during the March 17 meeting that the company’s general policy was that reporters who cannot revoke the use of their bylines must keep them attached to CSA-produced stories. For those who can revoke their byline, she said, McClatchy will still use their work anyway.

“We have every right to use their work,” she said, according to multiple sources familiar with the meeting. “It belongs to us, and if an editor wants to go … in there and repurpose a reporter’s content, they can put their name on it.”

Unions have gotten involved, limiting how those bylines get used, but not every paper has a union.

An unwanted byline introduces murky questions

What’s fascinating about the Wrap piece is the divide between journalists and executives that it exposes. VPs and business staffers seem excited about the opportunities this opens up. Journalists are upset that their names are going to be associated with work they didn’t actually write.

I’m not a lawyer, but the decision to essentially force non-unionized employees to include their bylines on pieces they didn’t write feels like it could be legally risky to me. Let me pose a scenario: Let’s say one of these LLM stories gets something wrong, and a journalist gets strong pushback on social media about the story, maybe even death threats, even though they didn’t write it. Does that put the newspaper at risk of a lawsuit from their own employee? Given our current culture, that does not seem far-fetched.

There are other risks, too: Imagine a defamation lawsuit against a journalist based on an error AI introduced, for example. And for readers, it might introduce a misrepresentation risk that gets a regulator like the Federal Trade Commission to weigh in, potentially even restricting the use of AI in news content. The parallels to the Wild West of early adtech are hard to miss.

If it was the government forcing this situation, that byline might even be seen as “compelled speech,” though employers have a lot more leverage. Nonetheless, it points at a moral wrong of sorts, a breaking of norms, and one that feels avoidable. After all, journalists typically have the right to take their bylines off of pieces, even if McClatchy appears to be quietly eliminating that right.

By McClatchy attempting to make this shift, it highlights the weakening state of the power dynamic between the newsroom and its employees. And AI is the justification.

A truism about AI: It’s often a scapegoat

Another headline that I stumbled upon around the same time I think points to a broader issue: Often, AI is just used as a reason to do something that employees would otherwise be uncomfortable with.

This week, Meta announced a plan to start tracking employees’ mouse and keyboard input, with the idea of building training data for its AI agents. See, it’s okay if we spy on you, because it’s for AI.

Let’s be clear, if Meta wanted to do this, it would just do it. It doesn’t need to attach AI as an excuse. But the addition makes it generally more palatable.

Likewise, if McClatchy wanted to have a bunch of inexperienced interns or non-journalists repackage content in haphazard, over-the-top ways, it could just do it. If it wanted to strip employees of the right to take their name off a story, it could just do it. But AI gives it enough of a sheen that it takes attention off the fact there’s nothing stopping them from just doing it because today is a day that ends in y.

And I think that’s ultimately the point I want to get at here. Employers are going to say a lot of things in the coming years and blame AI for doing those things. After all, it’s a great wrench for hammering in nails. But let’s not be silly: It’s also an excellent excuse to sweep a lot of other changes through, whether it’s layoffs or costing employees some of their taken-for-granted rights.

In Wizard of Oz parlance, don’t let the flashy visuals fool you: There’s a human behind the curtain, making the choices that could reshape your life and career.