McClatchy’s AI News Tool Sparks Backlash Among Pulitzer-Winning Journalists Over Job Security Fears

During an hourlong staff meeting last month, McClatchy’s vice president of local news, Eric Nelson, pitched what he called “a powerful addition to our toolbox.” Nelson was promoting the company’s new “content scaling agent,” an AI summarization tool powered by Anthropic’s Claude, which he claimed could help reporters find “new audiences, angles and entry points.”

“Journalists who embrace and experiment with this tool are going to win. Journalists who are defiant will fall behind. Bottom line: We need more stories and we need more inventory.”

Since reporting earlier this month how McClatchy’s new AI tool has angered staffers across several of its Pulitzer Prize-winning newsrooms, TheWrap has obtained new details about how the tool works from the March 17 company meeting. This includes screenshots of the tool and insight into how management is pitching it to employees, as well as how they are responding to reporters’ concerns about adding their bylines to AI-assisted articles.

Executives have framed the tool as “Grammarly on steroids,” a way to extend a story’s reach beyond its initial audience. However, some journalists at McClatchy—a 168-year-old newspaper chain serving nearly 30 U.S. markets—fear it could undermine their work and are pushing back.

At least three unions representing McClatchy newsrooms—the Miami Herald, the Sacramento Bee, and the Kansas City Star—filed grievances against the company last week for allegedly violating contract provisions requiring advanced notice for any “major technological change,” according to two people familiar with the matter. The move followed information requests from some of those unions expressing concern over “limited information and mixed messaging” about the product.

The contrast between executives’ enthusiasm for the tool and employees’ reluctance to use it reflects how generative AI tools have splintered newsrooms across the country. While outlets such as Cleveland’s Plain Dealer have used the technology to let reporters prioritize reporting over writing, unionized staffers at Pulitzer-winning outlets such as ProPublica and the New York Times have sought AI guardrails in negotiations, even prompting a daylong walkout at ProPublica.

A McClatchy spokesperson did not respond to TheWrap’s detailed questions about the company’s AI strategy, its internal guidelines, and executives’ comments at the March meeting.

How McClatchy’s AI Content Scaling Agent Works

The content scaling agent, or CSA, allows newsroom editors to generate short- and long-form summaries of reporters’ stories, versions targeted at specific audiences, and video scripts for reporters to produce short-form content from their stories. The CSA landing page for a McClatchy newsroom—the first page one sees when they open the tool—touts it as able to “assist with research, editing, personalization and amplification.”

According to one page outlining its work, the tool is “a writing partner that handles the mechanical work of content adaptation so journalists can focus on what matters: judgment, voice and storytelling.”

A screengrab of the landing page for a McClatchy content scaling agent, obtained by TheWrap, reads: “You author the research draft. CSA helps format it for different audiences and platforms—each