In a Volatile Landscape for AI and Labor Rights, Journalists at ABC Secure a Win

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Last week, the bargaining unit representing journalists at ABC News, which belongs to the Writers Guild of America East, “overwhelmingly” voted to ratify a three-year contract. Among other things, it includes binding protections against potential harms posed by generative artificial intelligence that the WGAE described as a “precedent setting win” for the news business. The agreement ensures that ABC News will not lay off current employees due to the use of generative AI and requires management to provide union members with advance notice before implementing AI systems into newsroom workflows. Additionally, the company will have to negotiate with the union regarding the potential impact of AI and meet with the group “semi-annually” to discuss its use of the technology.

The contract highlights a growing recognition of the need to safeguard media workers’ jobs in an evolving technological landscape. Generative AI capabilities present philosophical challenges to traditional newsroom practices, prompting critical discussions about which aspects of journalistic work, if any, can be responsibly automated without compromising ethics or audience trust. (For instance, while there might be some use cases for automation in newsroom workflows, generative AI’s propensity to “hallucinate”—or generate information that might sound plausible but is, in fact, false—makes it deeply unreliable.) Confronting these questions gives journalists the opportunity to reflect on and reaffirm their professional values and responsibilities. Union contracts, like the one ratified at ABC, play a key part in ensuring that workers have a say in how AI shapes their industry. 

Around the same time as the ABC contract was being finalized, the researchers Mike Ananny and Jake Karr published a new paper, “How Media Unions Stabilize Technological Hype,” in the journal Digital Journalism. Ananny and Karr argue that “unions’ responses to GenAI are not simply about organized labor defending news and jobs—protecting against hallucinations and automation—but they are also about media workers’ trying to stabilize a new, opaque, and rapidly changing technology. In doing so, they show what they think their work is, why it has value, and what working conditions their success requires.”

Decisions about AI in newsrooms are often made and enforced from the top down, which can create a disconnect between the priorities of management and the needs and concerns of rank-and-file staff. Analyzing the journalistic trade press, statements from unions, and collective bargaining agreements, Ananny and Karr identified a sense of unease among workers who feel that leaders at their organizations are more enthusiastic about generative AI than they are; bosses’ lack of transparency, meanwhile, has eroded workers’ trust in their decision-making. The union materials that the authors analyzed reflected workers’ desire for greater involvement in decision-making processes and the ability to contribute to the shaping of ethics guidelines and work rules around the technology.

There have been several instances in which newsroom workers have been caught off guard by decisions to publish content generated with the use of AI—recently, staff at G/O Media pointed out that Quartz was publishing AI-generated news articles that aggregated reporting by real journalists at outlets including TechCrunch and CNN—or enter licensing agreements with AI companies (under the terms of which AI firms often get access to news organizations’ content for training and display purposes in exchange for compensation and/or technical perks). After The Atlantic announced a deal with OpenAI last May, for instance, dozens of unionized staffers signed a letter calling on the magazine to “stop prioritizing its bottom line and champion The Atlantic‘s journalism,” and demanded AI-related protections in their union contract. Similarly, in June, the union representing staffers at Business Insider urged management to share details of a deal that its parent company, Axel Springer, inked with OpenAI, writing in a letter that they were “deeply worried that despite this partnership, OpenAI may be downplaying rather than elevating our works.”

Beyond their impact on the quality and presentation of journalistic output, managerial decisions about generative AI have profound implications for media workers’ control over their data and creative identities. Journalists are rarely able to opt out of having their work used to train AI systems, exacerbating a significant power imbalance; unions seek to address this through collective bargaining, pushing for contractual safeguards. “Workers seek stability and security in their professional lives, and they see contractual limitations on the use of their names, likenesses, and content, along with the ability to opt out of GenAI training, as crucial means to those ends,” Ananny and Karr write.

Collective bargaining is not a perfect solution to all the potential harms of generative AI—or any of the other workplace imbalances that it seeks to protect against. Nor is it available to everyone. As of 2022, only about one in six journalists employed at a US news outlet was part of a union, according to a Pew Research Center survey. (A further 41 percent said they’d join if the option were available to them.) And, as Hanaa’ Tameez pointed out in a recent piece for Nieman Lab, President Trump’s shake-ups to the already underfunded and understaffed National Labor Relations Board mean that workers across industries, including journalism, will likely face even longer processing times for things like union petitions and labor violation claims. Last week, Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox, a member of the board, leaving it without a quorum and thus unable to issue decisions on federal cases. (As with so many of Trump’s early moves, the firing seems likely to be resolved in court.) 

During his first term, Trump’s decidedly pro-employer stance undermined basic worker protections and union rights. Still, Jon Schleuss, the president of the NewsGuild–Communications Workers of America, told Tameez that the organization saw a huge wave of media union organizing during Trump’s first term, and that he expects to see a similar trend this time around. (Just this week, journalists at LancasterOnline and WITF, a public radio station in Pennsylvania, voted to unionize.) Absent fair and timely enforcement of labor laws, workers may resort to tactics like work stoppages and strikes. Last week, 97 percent of unionized journalists at New York magazine threatened to go on strike for the first time, according to Puck. One of the sticking points: contractual protections against replacement by AI.

Amid attacks on workers’ rights, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, the president of the WGAE, stressed the importance of union contracts in protecting journalists and praised the agreement at ABC. “Now more than ever, we need journalists who can report and present the news while they are protected in their workplace,” she said. “A union contract is the only thing that ensures that protection. Our members and staff fought hard for this contract, and they deserve everything they won.”

Other notable stories:

• Yesterday, a narrative spread among right-wingers online that the US Agency for International Development has been financing Politico; the narrative was false—in fact, all federal agencies combined spent eight million dollars on subscriptions to a Politico product last year—but Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, nonetheless told reporters that the subscriptions would be canceled. Leavitt made the announcement while hosting a formal briefing yesterday, her third overall; the rotating briefing-room seat for a representative of “new media” went to Sage Steele, the former ESPN star turned right-wing podcaster, who later got a shout-out from President Trump as he signed an order aimed at banning trans athletes from women’s sports. And, in other Trumpworld media news, Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, is getting a show on Fox.
  
• 404 Media reports that staffers at Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency have been told to stop using the messaging platform Slack as the body brings itself under the aegis of the Executive Office of the President—a step that could put its internal records beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act, as we noted in Monday’s newsletter (though this will be challenged in court). The step would bring DOGE under the purview of the Presidential Records Act, although, as the Freedom of the Press Foundation notes, this contains “giant loopholes” when it comes to record preservation and disclosure. For now, small outlets focused on the federal workforce are leading the way on uncovering what Musk and his allies are doing, as CNN reports.
  
• On Monday, we noted reports that spyware made by Paragon, an Israeli firm, has been used to target the phones of journalists, including a reporter who has investigated the prime minister’s party in Italy; now, per The Guardian, Paragon has ended its contracts with Italian state agencies. In other international press freedom news, Russia effectively expelled the French newspaper Le Monde’s Moscow correspondent; the country blamed French officials for refusing to accredit Russian journalists, though France believes these were actually intelligence agents. And the BBC profiled Mzia Amaglobeli, a journalist in Georgia who has gone on hunger strike to oppose the country’s authoritarian drift.
  
• In 2023, we covered efforts by the World Health Organization to train journalists around the world to better cover road deaths, with experts arguing that stories should take into account structural and policy factors that cause them rather than reflexively blaming individuals or talking of isolated incidents. Now a new study, backed by the WHO, has quantified trends in coverage of road safety in five English-speaking countries in Africa, where the problem is particularly acute; the study found that “victim-blaming” was prevalent, with most stories failing to mention road safety laws or infrastructure issues.
  
• And for the independent platform The Handbasket (whose founder, Marisa Kabas, we profiled in yesterday’s newsletter), Katelyn Burns reflects on the “total mindfuck” of covering Trump as a trans journalist. Since retaking office, Trump has “sprayed the anti-trans firehose at us, obliterating the rights of my community,” Burns writes; at the same time, this has spurred a newfound demand for her work. “I can’t help but feel guilt at profiting from the suffering of my community, while also feeling like I deserve to be fairly compensated for my work covering all of these horrible new policies,” Burns writes.

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Klaudia Jaźwińska is a journalist and researcher for the Tow Center who studies the relationship between the journalism and technology industries. Her previous affiliations include Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, the Berkman Klein Center’s Institute for Rebooting Social Media and the Our Data Bodies project. Klaudia is a Marshall Scholar, a FASPE Journalism Fellow, and a first-generation alumna of the London School of Economics, Cardiff University and Lehigh University.