Union Strength: The Future With AI, According To Media Unions

When thinking about AI in publishing, most of my focus is on the potential that AI tools have for all all departments. Even editorial departments, full of journalists that audiences count on to be professionally skeptical, can find value in the technology’s capabilities to complement the hard work they do.

A recent Digital Journalism article took a closer look at the messages that news media unions are sending about genAI, ultimately finding what authors Mike Ananny and Jake Carr break down as “six areas where news media unions are focusing their generative AI attention and concern — and, notably, two areas where they’re not.”

“We see this as a case of journalists articulating their roles and values in an all-too-common moment when they are challenged by sociotechnical forces that they did not create, but that they must nonetheless collectively navigate and reshape in service of the profession’s democratic mission,” says the “How Media Unions Stabilize Technological Hype” analysis.

AI Concerns Raised by News Media Unions

In looking at two years’ worth of union public statements, testimonies, CBAs, and other trade press articles, the study found much of the focus on:

1. How publishers are “the ones with the power to initiate generative AI experiments, control its use, and accelerate its adoption,” with some unions fighting for a more active role.
2. How a lack of transparency is driving distrust of publishers’ plans.
3. How unions “want publishers to trust workers’ judgments about whether and how to use generative AI.”
4. How the threat of automated news work isn’t simply a concern about job security, but one about “journalism’s accuracy and accountability, and its core professional values”
5. How “unions are agitating for greater control over news products … [which] creates some tension with publishers, but also aligns workers and management as they both struggle to counter the power of tech companies.”
6. How contractual guardrails are essential to stabilizing genAI, but that “direct worker action alone cannot force publishers to change their uses of generative AI.”

In addition to isolating those focuses, the authors found that unions were largely ignoring two other aspects in the larger conversation: genAI’s larger social, economical, and infrastructural impacts, as well as journalist wellbeing.

“These absences may simply be areas that fall outside of unions’ expertise or interest, or they may be deliberate and strategic choices to focus generative AI conversations around tractable and actionable concerns,” write the authors in Nieman Lab. “In any event, they suggest opportunities for news media unions to expand their thinking about who qualifies as a ‘media’ worker, to see journalistic GenAI within larger infrastructures and ecosystems, and perhaps to use this moment for advocacy that further foregrounds the humans and humanity that power journalism.”