Collectively bargaining the future of local journalism

Contract negotiations at five Pacific Northwest newspapers are putting a spotlight on AI, clickbait, and the pressures on local journalists

BOISE, ID (October 21, 2025) — Local journalism is a lifeline for folks living and working in the Pacific Northwest. National media, mostly based 3,000 miles away in New York or Washington D.C., rarely covers the region with in-depth reporting. When major outlets do get it right, it’s typically because they’re relying on the deeply researched, well-sourced work of local journalists, who understand PNW communities and have put in the work to establish trust in themselves and their outlets. But too often, local journalists doing this deep work are under pressure from management to push out content to grab readers’ attention and generate profit. Left unchecked, those motives erode the purpose and power of local journalism.

This tension between the pressure to produce and quality journalism is at the center of local journalists’ contract fights. The workers of the Daily Herald in Everett recently secured a contract without story quotas, a management priority that journalists saw as lethal to good journalism. Now, journalists at five local newspapers in the Northwest are in contract negotiations with owner McClatchy Media, seeking a new collective bargaining agreement that addresses harmful quotas, the saturation of AI-generated content, and low pay.

The five newspapers at the bargaining table are the Idaho Statesman, the Bellingham Herald, the Tacoma News Tribune, the Olympian, and the Tri-City Herald, with the workers represented by the Pacific Northwest NewsGuild. Each of these papers have been publishing for more than a century, kept alive by generations of dedicated journalists (The Olympian, with the longest tenure, has been publishing for 173 years). Today, journalists are fighting to keep 21st century problems from tanking these long-time pillars of local communities.

Owner McClatchy wants management to decide when AI will interview sources and write articles, replacing journalists’ work with what many would call “AI slop.” Workers are seeking to collectively bargain ethics guidelines for AI use, including banning the use of deepfakes that impersonate reporters’ voices and images, always telling readers which content is AI, and allowing reporters to review AI-generated material created using their work before publishing to find and correct mistakes. So far, McClatchy has refused to agree to these standards, instead pushing to be able to unilaterally change guidelines with no worker input.

Journalists are also fighting to get rid of story quotas that require journalists to churn out content in high quantities, rather than write stories of high quality. The pressure to produce or face professional repercussions results in clickbait — eye-grabbing headlines with little substance behind them — to keep management happy. It’s a tough working environment for journalists, and a disservice to readers, who come to local papers for news, not page-filler.

And journalists are also pushing for fair pay at the bargaining table. Rents have skyrocketed in the I-5 corridor, the Tri-Cities, and the Snake River Valley. Low pay is pushing good journalists into other jobs or out of the region entirely; this understaffing means important stories go underreported, a loss for local communities.

As negotiations continue, the NewsGuild is asking supporters to subscribe for email updates and keep an eye out for ways readers can support journalists as they continue to collectively bargain protections for the local journalism that has been a mainstay of this region for more than 100 years.