We're offering a 2-week trial of WrapPRO for $1. If you’ve been wanting to check out our full coverage, now’s the time. Greetings!Two weeks ago, our Corbin Bolies broke the story on newspaper chain McClatchy's AI-powered "content scaling agent" and how it elicited a vocal backlash at the Sacramento Bee. Today, Bolies dives back in with an inside look at the tool itself, as well as how the executives pitched it to the staff. “Journalists who embrace and experiment with this tool are going to win,” Eric Nelson, McClatchy's vice president of local news, told employees at a staff meeting last month, according to multiple people familiar with the session. “Journalists who are defiant will fall behind. Bottom line: We need more stories and we need more inventory.” It's a blunt way of selling what its executives are calling "Grammarly on steroids." Their enthusiasm for the AI tool juxtaposed with journalists' reluctance to use it or have their names associated with the generated content speaks to a conflict brewing in newsroom across the country. Outlets such as Cleveland’s Plain Dealer have used the technology to let reporters prioritize reporting over writing, while unionized staffers at Pulitzer-winning outlets such as ProPublica and the New York Times have sought AI guardrails in negotiations, even prompting a daylong walkout at ProPublica. There's also the risk in damaging reader trust — the most critical asset for any publication. The use of AI could turn off readers while also drawing increased scrutiny for any mistakes made by the publication. As Bolies writes, a key conflict is whether to use a byline on one of these stories, since Google's SEO algorithms elevate stories that are credited with an authority on a topic (like a human journalist). While some publications, like the Bee, have rules allowing reporters to decline using their names, not all of its 30 newspapers have those protections. “If they don’t have the ability in their contract to remove their byline, we’re going to use their name,” Kathy Vetter, McClatchy’s chief of staff for local news, said in that same meeting. “Now, I’m not asking y’all to get in fist fights with all of them, but in the cases where we have to, they get to decide. If they decide not to, again, they don’t get credit. They don’t. We’re going to do it anyway, but they’re not going to get credit for it.” That kind of overbearing approach is one reason why journalists — and readers — still look at AI in news with a lot of skepticism. Roger Cheng Before we move on, be sure to follow me on my socials linked below for the latest updates. DMs are open for tips.    
McClatchy developed the in-house tool using Claude as its foundational model (the internal landing page for the tool even includes a Star Wars-esque credit reel highlighting who worked on the project with names like McClatchy’s senior vice president of marketing Jason Smith as "Bending the Spoon")... 
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