Journalists at five Northwest newspapers owned by McClatchy Media Company went on a one-day strike May 26, pushing back against their hedge-fund owned employer, which own 30 newspapers across the country. Members of the NewsGuild union, they’ve been working without a contract for nearly a year. In charges filed with the National Labor Relations Board, the union says the company is refusing to bargain in good faith.
It’s the latest flare-up in a long conflict between McClatchy, owned by Chatham Asset Management since 2020, and workers at The Olympian, The Bellingham Herald, The Tacoma News Tribune, Tri-City Herald, and Idaho Statesman. The four Washington papers are organized as the Washington State NewsGuild, and the Idaho Statesman workers call themselves the Idaho NewsGuild. The five newsrooms are bargaining together on this new contract.
The journalists themselves became the subject of headlines for their fight against having their articles fed into an internally developed proprietary tool called a “content scaling agent” — it takes articles written by McClatchy staffers and rewrites and repackages them for different audiences and platforms.
“McClatchy Media hopes you won’t notice if it replaces human stories with AI-generated content,” the bargaining unit’s website says. “The company thinks you’ll happily consume clickbait over real community stories.”
“If we didn’t write it, why would we put our name on it?” asks Tacoma News Tribune food and dining reporter Kristine Sherred, co-chair of the Washington State NewsGuild. “They know they need our name to be considered trustworthy.”
Workers also want improvements to their $45,000 starting annual salary and a $48,000 wage floor for existing workers. Of the five cities the newspapers operate in — Bellingham, Olympia, Pasco, and Tacoma, Washington; and Boise, Idaho — that is a living wage only in Boise, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator.
Sherred says McClatchy has offered a salary floor of $50,000 for new hires and $52,000 for current workers. McClatchy’s lead negotiator admitted the company did not take into account cost of living, but that she didn’t have the authority to improve its offer, Sherred said.
Their next bargaining session is scheduled for June 9.
