ProPublica’s union authorizes the first U.S. newsroom strike over AI protections

On March 20, members of the ProPublica Guild, one of the largest nonprofit newsroom unions in the U.S., overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike. Out of the roughly 150 journalists, copyeditors, videographers and other newsroom workers in the Guild, 92% of members voted to walk off the job if ProPublica doesn’t agree to their contract terms in the coming weeks.

The vote comes two and a half years into negotiations over the Guild’s first collective bargaining agreement, which started soon after the union was recognized back in August 2023.

One of the sticking points at the bargaining table has been an article that would prohibit ProPublica from laying off employees due to AI adoption. Alongside the dispute over AI, the Guild is also pushing for “just cause” when firing unit members, a provision that would give senior employees more job security during layoffs, and cost-of-living wage increases.

The Guild’s vote marks the first time a major U.S. newsroom has authorized a strike, at least in part, over AI protections.

Susan DeCarava, the president of the NewsGuild of New York, confirmed that, to her knowledge, no unit of The NewsGuild-CWA has previously faced or taken a strike over AI language. (A contract ratified after a strike by the LexisNexis-owned newsroom Law360 in 2024 included AI language, but the union went on strike to win reductions in healthcare costs and to protest mid-negotiation layoffs).

“Frankly, this fight over the use of AI in the ProPublica newsroom demonstrates that it’s the workers who are the heart of this journalistic enterprise, and who will fight to preserve it,” said DeCarava. “It’s a real shame, and a head-scratcher, that ProPublica management isn’t jumping at the opportunity to reassure donors and readers that they are just as committed as we are to human-reported and produced journalism.”

In a statement to Nieman Lab, Tyson Evans, the chief product and brand officer at ProPublica, said the newsroom is approaching the question of AI adoption with curiosity and skepticism.

“It would be a mistake to freeze editorial decisions in a contract that may last years,” Evans said. “Rather than make promises we can’t responsibly keep, we are exploring how these technologies can create more space for investigative reporting and thinking deeply and creatively, not less.”

Short of agreeing not to lay off employees as a result of AI adoption, ProPublica has proposed “expanded severance packages” for employees impacted by potential layoffs. Evans emphasized that “ProPublica has never had layoffs in our 18-year history, and we’re confident we can continue to navigate future changes responsibly.”

Increased severance packages have not been enough to quell the Guild’s concerns about AI displacement, according to Mark Olalde, a ProPublica staff reporter and member of the Guild’s bargaining committee.

“If the only thing standing between the company and laying people off is them having to pay a couple weeks more severance, they can easily do that,” he said. “It doesn’t keep [Guild members’] jobs. It doesn’t keep them doing journalism.”

According to Olalde, the severance offer also falls flat because management has rejected other robust AI protections, including language that would shield members from discipline if they decline to use AI tools and offers to bargain over specific AI use cases as they arise down the line. Instead, management has proposed “regular discussion” and training about the use and impact of generative AI.

“What’s to stop me from talking to management about tools in the workplace? I don’t need contract language saying I’m allowed to have a meeting,” said Olalde. “What these meetings are missing is, they’re not agreeing to any bargaining in them.”

The dispute over AI protections is not the only reason for the strike authorization vote. The Guild is also pushing for salary bumps to adjust for cost of living, which Olalde says has been of particular concern for union members in non-editorial roles, like development work. Also on the table is language that would create a “last in, first out” framework for layoffs, as well as a “just cause” provision that requires legitimate and documented reasons for firing an employee.

“We have tried for 27 months to be reasonable, to compromise, to hear the company’s opinion about what they need in terms of operational flexibility, and to change our own contract language to assist with that,” he said, explaining the Guild’s vote to authorize a strike. “If it’s not going to work at the bargaining table, we need to increase the pressure.”

The ProPublica Guild’s strike vote is just the latest example of a newsroom collective bargaining agreement becoming a battleground for debates over AI adoption in journalism. As of September 2025, 43 contracts negotiated by units of the NewsGuild-CWA, the largest union for journalists in the U.S., included language that referenced AI in some form.

Some of those unions have folded editorial guardrails directly into their contracts and used them as a lever to enforce standards. For example, the PEN Guild, which represents Politico and its sister site E&E News, has a contract that requires AI tools for “newsgathering” to meet the publication’s “standards for journalistic ethics.” Last December, an arbitrator ruled that Politico violated that contract when it rolled out two AI-powered editorial products that, among other issues, output factual inaccuracies, violated Politico’s style guide, and operated without corrections or retractions.

Other unions have used contracts to protect their newsrooms from potential AI displacement. In July 2024, the Ziff Davis Creators Guild, which represents workers from Mashable, CNET, and PCMag, became the first newsroom union in the country to win language that prohibited members from being laid off or receiving cuts in their base salary as a result of generative AI usage. Similar layoff protections have since been won by the nonprofit newsrooms Grist and CalMatters, and the Associated Press’ editorial unit.

AI was not a driving force behind the ProPublica newsroom’s decision to unionize back in 2023, Olalde said. Increasingly, though, the Guild has made adoption guardrails core to its bargaining efforts. In May 2024, the Guild introduced its first proposed AI article and has since won some concessions, including promises from management not to use the likeness of staffers to create “digital replicas.”

The Guild also has also asked for transparency for readers over how AI is being used in editorial production. Recently, ProPublica published its first public AI principles, including promises to disclose “meaningful” usage of AI in the reporting process to readers and to verify claims output by generative AI tools before publication. The company says it won’t use AI to “replace the original reporting, analysis and judgment of our journalists.”

Olalde says management has so far declined to “enshrine” these standards directly in the Guild’s contract.

To date, ProPublica has mostly disclosed using generative AI for investigative journalism. That includes a March 2025 investigation that used a large language model (LLM) to interrogate a list of National Science Foundation grants that had been branded by Sen. Ted Cruz as promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). After the story ran, ProPublica published a detailed blog post about how AI was used in the reporting process, including running its full prompt language.

“ProPublica is not sprinting to embrace AI and pivot to that right now, but things change on a dime. We also didn’t expect them to take OpenAI money, and they did,” Olalde said, referring to ProPublica’s announcement last year that it would join the Lenfest Institute’s AI Collaborative and Fellowship program. Backed by OpenAI funding, the program placed a machine learning engineer in the ProPublica newsroom for two years.

“Our relationship with readers has always been based on trust. ProPublica’s ethics policy is clear that there are no hidden agendas in our work,” said Evans, the chief brand officer.

Before moving ahead with any strike actions, the Guild is scheduled to return to the bargaining table tomorrow, Wednesday, March 25.