I am a reporter at the Idaho Statesman. My name goes on top. That is the part of the job that survived.
They call it AI adoption. The newsroom did not adopt anything. A policy adopted us. We were told to use the tool. Using the tool is now a line in my performance file, the same line that used to say "filed on deadline."
The tool has a name. Internally it is Cadence. Cadence assists. Assists is the verb they gave it. Cadence assists me the way a current assists a swimmer who has stopped swimming.
Here is how a day works now, for the next person who sits in this chair.
You get a quota. They do not call it a quota. They call it content velocity, a KPI now, tracked by quarter, and velocity has a number, and the number is 9 assisted items a shift, which is higher than the number of things that actually happened in this county today. So Cadence fills the gap between what happened and what the number requires. Cadence reads the public calendar, the press releases, the police log, last year's story, and it writes a version. There is no slug for "nothing occurred." Your job is to put your name on the version. They call it editorial oversight. I oversee the way a man standing near a car accident oversees traffic.
I want to tell you about Front Street Brewing, because Front Street is the reason I am telling you anything.
Front Street did not close. I need you to hold that. Front Street is open right now. The lights are on, the taps work, a man named who I will not name is behind the bar tonight pouring for people who read, three weeks ago, under my name, that his business had shut its doors.
Cadence wrote that it closed. Cadence read a permit lapse and a slow Tuesday and a competitor's closure and it produced a sentence, and the sentence was clean, and clean is what the system rewards. I did not write that sentence. I select the ones I keep. I kept it because I had eleven more items in the queue and Cadence had given me a finished thing and a finished thing is the only thing the number counts.
My byline was on it within 40 minutes. That was the speed they wanted. They call it editorial efficiency. Editorial efficiency means the distance between a false sentence and a trusted name is now measured in minutes. Who reads the assisted copy before it posts? Nobody whose name is on it. That is the only name the policy requires.
The owner called the next morning. He has called every Thursday since. He wants a correction. He is owed a correction. The correction policy says corrections are issued promptly upon editorial review. There is no SLA on a correction. There is one on velocity. I will let you guess which number the dashboard tracks.
I filed the correction the first day. It went into a queue. The queue is called Pending Editorial Review. There is no one in Pending Editorial Review. I have asked who is in Pending Editorial Review. They told me the question was being escalated. Escalated is a direction that does not have a floor.
I cannot kill the story. The killing of a story used to be mine to do. A reporter could pull a slug off the rail. Now the rail belongs to Cadence, and Cadence does not recognize the word kill, only publish and assist.
Here is the part nobody on the floor says out loud, so I will say it for the handoff.
They did not buy a machine to replace me. A machine cannot be sued. A machine cannot be named in a correction. A machine has no employment file to put a line in. They kept me because the system needs one thing the machine cannot supply, and it is not judgment, and it is not reporting, and it is not the thing I went to school for.
It is a name to put the liability on.
A byline is the byline now. I used to think it was a credit. It was the thing you earned, the thing that meant I stood behind this, I made the calls, ask me. There is a laminated card in my drawer from orientation, byline standards, and it says the byline represents the author's responsibility for the accuracy of the work. They were telling me the truth. I heard it as an honor. It was a job description.
The byline carries the author's responsibility for the accuracy of the work. The work is now written by a tool I am ordered to use and forbidden to overrule, and the accuracy is whatever Cadence produced before I woke up, and the responsibility is mine. Read it the way the policy means it. The byline did not stop meaning responsibility. They took everything off the page except the responsibility.
I write the story. I do not write the story. Both are true now, and the second one is the one the law will not see.
We voted. 93% of us authorized the strike. We walked for one day, 5 newsrooms, the Statesman and four in Washington, reporters standing outside the building we fill, holding signs that say a thing so simple it embarrasses me to write it under a byline. The signs say we want to be allowed to be right. Is that a radical demand? It used to be the whole job.
They came back with 2%. Two percent on the wage. On the mandate, nothing. We asked who decided the AI policy. We asked for a name. You will appreciate this, given everything I have told you about names. They would not give us one. They sent a representative who was authorized to listen and not authorized to decide, like a phone tree that ends in a recording. The company calls that a stakeholder alignment session. The union calls it bad-faith bargaining. My version is simpler. The decision was made by Pending Editorial Review, and Pending Editorial Review was not at the table either.
Everyone on this floor knows where the policy came from. Knowing it and being told it are different rooms, and the door between them is the whole company.
So here is the handoff. The brewery is open. The story says it closed. The correction is filed. The queue is empty and infinite. The quota resets at midnight. Cadence is already three items ahead of you. Your name goes on top.
When the owner calls Thursday, and he will, you can tell him what I tell him. You can tell him the correction is in editorial review. It is. It has been. It is the most honest sentence I say all week, and it is the reason he no longer believes a word in his hometown paper, which means it worked.
The byline represents the author's responsibility for the accuracy of the work. They kept the byline. They kept the author. They kept the responsibility. The accuracy was the only part that was optional.
I file the next one at nine.