Other examples piled up: This past summer, Sherred and her colleagues noticed that items were being rearranged on the Tacoma News Tribune homepage, thanks to AI-fueled testing. “If our own work is being buried by random stuff that was pulled on there through an AI tool,” Sherred told me, “we were concerned about that.” Then, she said, McClatchy started rolling out more of the “summary-type AI-generated stories where they’re essentially using our work to feed something else.”

AI-created listicles were cropping up, drawing from McClatchy-journalist-created work à la the golden retriever situation—but sometimes getting details slightly wrong. Other McClatchy reporters spotted curious “AI-assisted reporter” listings—including for the Miami Herald, another McClatchy paper, which the Miami New Times, an alt-weekly, flagged in an article headlined “The Miami Herald Is Hiring an AI-Assisted Reporter and We Have Questions.”

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Notably, employees at McClatchy papers cannot bargain as a united coalition, even though “that would make sense for us,” Van De Venter said, since at the corporate level, “they make policies that impact the entire company.” Those in the Pacific Northwest have kept a watchful eye on the Miami Herald, whose union finished bargaining before its own contract was up for renegotiation.

In Miami, AI protections allow use with anything from transcription and spell-check to data analysis, summarization, and display. “The stories you see on McClatchy homepages are chosen by local editors with help from an AI algorithm,” the Herald site discloses. “It’s not necessarily terrible,” Clark said, of the AI policy. “But they can change it anytime they like.”