Reporters at McClatchy Withhold Bylines in A.I. Dispute

McClatchy, the newspaper chain behind publications including The Sacramento Bee, The Miami Herald and The Idaho Statesman, has started to use a new artificial intelligence tool that can summarize traditional articles and spit out different versions for different audiences.

Its reporters aren’t happy about it.

Journalists in many of the company’s newsrooms are now withholding their bylines from articles created by the new tool, meaning that those articles will run with a generic credit rather than a reporter’s name, as is customary. They are also labeled A.I.-assisted.

“We don’t want to put our bylines on stories we did not actually write even if they’re based on our work,” said Ariane Lange, an investigative reporter at The Sacramento Bee and the vice chair of The Sacramento Bee News Guild. “That in itself feels like a lie.”

The reporters’ byline strike is one of the sharpest conflicts yet between journalists and their companies over the use of A.I. Related debates are playing out in newsrooms across the country, as publishers experiment with new A.I. tools to streamline work that used to take hours, and some even use it to write full articles.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/business/media/mcclatchy-ai-newsroom-byline-strike.html