You’re reading a blog post by Mike Pearl based on a news report about AI-generated news articles by Corbin Bolies of TheWrap. While my hyperlink to his work is obligatory and standard, if Bolies is like most writers, it would probably irk him a great deal if the byline of this article said “Reporting by Corbin Bolies with Mike Pearl’s assistance.”
And if I were not a human blogger, but a piece of AI software, would that be better or worse?
According to Bolies and TheWrap, a new piece of Claude-based AI tech is getting rolled out in the newsrooms of the McClatchy Media family of newspapers, and some journalists are being forced to take partial bylines, even when an AI system “wrote” their article.
The tool, called the content scaling agent (CSA) enables editors to create summaries of varying length for any story. I’m imagining the idea of “scaling” a jpeg larger or smaller, but applied to a piece of text. But the CSA can also create, to quote TheWrap, “versions targeted at specific audiences.” TheWrap says page of internal information reviewed by Boiles calls it “a writing partner that handles the mechanical work of content adaptation so journalists can focus on what matters: judgment, voice and storytelling.”
TheWrap links to an example: a piece in Pennsylvania’s Centre Daily Times, credited with the following format: “Reporting by [author redacted]. Produced with AI assistance.” The AI-generated article is two short paragraphs of prose, followed by the heading “Here are the highlights” and then five bullet points. There’s a link in the middle of the article to the full, human-written story, and it’s just shy of 1,200 words long and contains six data-heavy graphics.
According to TheWrap, the Centre Daily Times is non-union. The Sacramento Bee, TheWrap says, is a unionized publication, and omits the author entirely. Its byline format reads “Edited by [editor redacted]. Story produced with AI assistance.” The unionized Miami Herald’s CSA bylines use the format “produced using AI based on original work by [author redacted],” which uses the author’s name, but doesn’t sound like they sought “AI assistance.”
At a McLatchy staff meeting quoted by TheWrap, the company’s chief of staff for local news, Kathy Vetter, reportedly responded to one question by saying “If they don’t have the ability in their contract to remove their byline, we’re going to use their name.”
TheWrap says last week, grievances filed by the unions at the McClatchy-owned Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee and Kansas City Star allege that McClatchy’s CSA was rolled out in violation of contract provisions saying the unions must be notified before “major technological change.”
McClatchy did not return a request for comment on Tuesday evening. We will update this article if we receive one.
