Dozens of unionized Seattle Times workers picketed near the newsroom on Denny Way yesterday after they say the newspaper’s owners refused to satisfactorily raise wages or agree not to replace workers with AI during contract negotiations.
The picket is the Seattle Times’ first big labor action in decades, and a sign that disagreements between those who make the newspaper and the company that profits off them has reached an inflection point.
One main point of contention in ongoing contract negotiations is something any working Seattleite can understand: Seattle Times journalists say the company doesn’t pay them enough to live in our expensive city.
According to the Seattle Times Union, which is repped by the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, as are Noisy Union workers at The Stranger, the company’s most recent offer would raise wages for the more than 160 represented employees by only $1,250 a year, or $48 per paycheck before taxes—that’s two quarters and a dime per hour. That’s a less than 2 percent raise for most union members, which alongside the region’s high 4.4 percent inflation (per the Seattle Times own reporting) means the company is offering workers a pay cut to their real wages.
For contrast, Seattle’s minimum wage is tied to inflation and set to increase by 3.9 percent in 2027, meaning Seattle Times workers have been offered percentage raises below what Seattle is required to pay its poorest workers.
Ryan Nguyen, an education reporter who has been at the Seattle Times for 5 years, says affordability has been one of the newsroom’s main pillars of coverage for the past year. He recently reported on the Seattle teachers union’s struggles with wages that didn’t keep up with costs, a topic that can feel strange to cover as an important issue when the company doesn’t deem its own employees underpayment noteworthy.
“There is a lot of cognitive dissonance between the topics that we cover and our day-to-day lives,” he says.
Nguyen says while the company touts its strong financial position relative to other metro dailies as a result of its focus on quality journalism, the Seattle Times has been unwilling to invest profits back into those who produce that value for readers in the first place.
When he first started at the Times back in 2021 Nguyen made $51,000, which he says was “extremely difficult to live on in.” While his wages have since increased, the wage floor at the Times is still below what many other news outlets in Seattle maintain, and makes it hard to stick around as employees grow older.
He says it’s scary to see people who have dedicated so much to the company for years struggling with whether or not they can put down long term roots in the community.
“For a lot of my colleagues who want to start a family, the wages are particularly pernicious,” he says.
Concerns over low wages are nothing new for journalists (or most Seattle workers) but it’s only one of the issues the Seattle Times Union has with the company. To get into the others, we’ll need to discuss the elephant in the room. Or rather, the giant rat outside the newsroom.
In time honored labor union tradition, the Seattle Times Union deployed Scabby the Rat on their picket line Wednesday, the giant inflatable rodent meant to call attention to employers using non-union labor or “scabs” during strikes. While there’s no strike at the Seattle Times, Scabby’s presence serves to illustrate another major concern Times workers have with management: the company’s refusal to pledge not to replace newsroom workers with artificial intelligence software.
According to the union, while the company has agreed not to use AI to interview sources or write articles—protecting the jobs of reporters—they’ve so far refused to agree to contract language protecting other journalists on staff such as photographers, copy editors, illustrators, page designers, and more. That’s roughly half the newsroom.
While the public might have a good idea of what replacing a reporter with AI will look like—slop sentences, manufactured facts, and an overuse of emdashes—the essential work of editors and designers is less visible, and its replacement with AI harder to imagine. The Stranger’s readers often remind us of the typographical errors resulting from cutting copy editors (thank you), but there’s more to it than just that.
Brandon Foster, a copy editor who has been with the Seattle Times for 5 years, says while people often think copy editors are just spellcheckers (and therefore easily replaceable by AI), in actuality they wear a lot more hats than that.
“Something that can’t be replaced is putting ourselves in the position of a reader,” he says.
Beyond checking spelling and grammar, a professional copy editor is a professional storyteller. They can see where a story might trip up a reader, or if the lede is buried, or if there’s a factual error or logical problem that means a story needs to go back to a reporter for more work before running. Software can’t make calls like that.
“You are sort of that last line of defense if there’s a huge hole in the story and you have to send it back,” Foster says.
Foster says reader trust in the Seattle Times would diminish with AI in the mix, and that while the copy desk might not be the most visible part of a news organization, its absence certainly is.
As a former sports reporter, he compares copy editors to a good offensive line in football: the best one is the one you don’t even notice is there.
Despite not agreeing to the same AI moratoriums common to other newsroom contracts, the Seattle Times has tried to present the organization to the public as opposed to AI in journalism. In a September 27 message to readers that reads like they got some angry subscriber emails, Executive Editor Michele Matassa Flores spelled out for readers the company’s policy on AI in the newsroom, including that the paper is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for mass copyright infringement (so are we!)
“The Seattle Times does not publish news stories produced by artificial intelligence. Full stop,” Flores wrote.
Compare that to the company’s language during contract negotiations, according to the Seattle Times Union: “What if you had an AI that could design pages? And someone is leaving. We need to look at positions and make decisions and keep the health of the company in mind.”
The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild responded to Flores’ piece in the story’s comments: “The Seattle Times Co. has refused to guarantee that no newsroom jobs will be replaced by AI. The company has only agreed to protect reporters, leaving scores of other Seattle Times jobs — including photographers, graphic artists, copy editors, producers and more — unprotected. And yet, executive editor Michele Matassa Flores in this column lists photographers and editors among the human relationships that are required in journalism. Union members agree, and we would like to see the company show that it is as committed to human journalism — done by reporters, photographers and editors — as Flores claims in this column.”
The Stranger reached out to the Seattle Times for comment and they only got back to us after publication. In a statement, Seattle Times President and CEO, Alan Fisco said, “We are aware of the Guild’s informational picket, and we respect that our employees want to share their concerns with the public. We understand the Guild’s concerns regarding the development of AI in the workplace, and especially its potential impact on journalism. These are complex issues that require a thoughtful, deliberate approach. To that end, we remain committed to negotiating with the Guild toward mutually acceptable contract language regarding AI use at the Seattle Times, as well as resolution of all other outstanding issues.”
This story has been updated to include comment from the Seattle Times, which, we’d like to point out, they got to us after the deadline we gave them.
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