The Byline Battle: When AI Puts Your Name on Someone Else's Work

McClatchy's AI Byline Mess Is a Warning Shot

Here's what happened: McClatchy started using AI to repackage previously published stories, then kept the original reporter's byline on the new content—even when that reporter had zero involvement. Unions at the Miami Herald, Kansas City Star, and Sacramento Bee filed grievances. Some reporters are now withholding their bylines entirely in protest. The company's VP of local news told staff that journalists who 'embrace' the tools will win, while those who are 'defiant will fall behind.' Which... is one way to build newsroom buy-in, I suppose.

How you implement AI matters as much as whether you use it—getting staff buy-in before you flip the switch prevents exactly this kind of mess.

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Your Readers Haven't Tried AI—But They're Watching You

New research from the Minnesota Journalism Center and Poynter surveyed 1,128 Americans in March. The finding that jumped out at me: 40% of your readers have never used AI tools at all. Not once. But two-thirds believe news organizations are already using it—and by a 3-to-1 margin, they have little or no confidence in newsrooms doing so responsibly. The people most skeptical? Those with higher news literacy. Your most engaged readers are watching closest.

Your savviest subscribers—the ones who actually read the paper cover to cover—are the ones most likely to notice if you're cutting corners with AI.

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58% Want Guidelines Before Experimentation

Same study, different angle. When asked what newsrooms should do with AI, 58% of respondents said they want clear ethical guidelines established first. Only 2%—two percent—said newsrooms should prioritize experimentation even if it means mistakes. And the vast majority said disclosure is 'very important' even when humans verify AI-generated content. Focus groups revealed something deeper: anxiety about losing the human connection to their news, and fear of being manipulated.

Publishing a simple AI policy on your website isn't bureaucratic overhead—it's a prerequisite for keeping reader trust intact.

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Small Papers Are Already Using AI More Than Big Ones

Here's a number I hadn't seen before: about 9% of major newspapers use AI for news content production, according to University of Maryland research. But experts estimate small publications use it more extensively. Makes sense, honestly. When you're a three-person shop putting out 40 pages a week, anything that saves an hour matters. We're not waiting for permission from the industry—we're already figuring this out in the trenches.

Community papers are leading AI adoption out of necessity, not because we had consultants draw up a five-year roadmap.

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Have you let your readers know yet?

At Citizen Publishing, we began using AI in our newsroom in late 2024 — but only after writing to you about it twice on this editorial page. We call our approach HUMAN LAST: a person reads, edits, and signs off on every story before it reaches you, every time. To make that promise visible, we publish a small gold index number at the end of any AI-assisted article — a 1 means light AI editing, a 2 means AI helped organize routine information like sports scores or court reports, and a 3 means AI drafted from a structured document that a human then reviewed and corrected. No number means a person wrote every word (and AI still proofed it, because a machine catches typos a tired editor misses). Contact me today and I can send you what we did!

AI is being used to generate fake local news at scale, the only paper worth subscribing to is the one that tells you exactly what its tools did and what its people did. That's the line we drew before we touched a single tool — and it's the line we'll keep drawing as the tools change.

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