Hundreds of journalists demand USA Today Co. end Palantir partnership
Nearly 800 journalists at USA Today Co. papers signed a statement calling for the company to end its newly-announced partnership with software company Palantir, whose products have been used by the U.S. government to support immigration raids.
Nearly 800 workers at newspapers owned by USA Today Co., the U.S.’s largest newspaper publisher, are demanding the company end its newly-announced partnership with Palantir, whose software has been used by the U.S. government to track immigrants and to map people targeted by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
“Not only does partnering with Palantir, a major player in the news we cover, create an inherent conflict of interest, but it fails the journalists who have been assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests,” a statement released on Monday and signed by 31 USA Today Co. guilds said.
The guilds represent newspapers in 18 states throughout the U.S., including border states like Arizona, where local police carried out the first “model” of immigration raids, and New Jersey, the first place with a township voting to ban construction of AI data centers and ICE jails.
USA Today Co., formerly known as Gannett, announced it was working with Palantir at its quarterly earnings meeting on Aug. 6. Chairman Mike Reed told investors it would “drive more effective and faster monetization across our platform.” The company is using Palantir software to collect and analyze audience data. Reed, nor the public release from USA Today Co., did not clarify how long the software had been in use.
Though USA Today Co. said in a statement to The Objective that its editorial decisions will remain independent, the precedent of Palantir’s software being used by the U.S. government efforts to expand surveillance and deport migrants could dent trust between local communities and USA Today Co. journalists. Palantir did not respond to a request for comment by publication of this article.
Asbury Park Press investigative reporter Mike Davis, one of six vice-chairs of the NewsGuild of New York, said the decision may mean one day a fellow journalist at a USA Today Co.-owned paper will be asked to answer for the decisions of Reed and USA Today Co.
“Somebody is going to say, ‘Why am I talking to you? Why are you doing this story? I can’t talk to you, because what happens if this winds up in Palantir?’” Davis said. “And that should not be the job of a reporter to answer for.”
Eroding trust when migrants, journalists covering immigration are under attack
Palantir’s role in immigration enforcement isn’t new. The company’s technology supported the skyrocketing number of immigration raids in 2018. Mijente, a grassroots Latine advocacy group running the campaign #NoTechForICE, published a report covering how the first Trump administration expanded the U.S. government’s involvement with Palantir. And as the second Trump administration has prioritized targeting migrants and mass surveillance, it is increasing investment in Palantir software to track and target immigrants. Speaking to the media also poses a safety hazard for migrants.
Davis said the USA Today Co. and Palantir partnership “makes everybody’s job a little bit harder,” particularly because it implicates local journalists.
“We’re talking to … people that are out there in the community going to the spaghetti dinners and the council meetings and the planning board meetings and the local protests against ICE,” he said. “We take our credibility very seriously. So regardless of what our individual opinions might be about ICE and Palantir, the company has still put us in a position where now members — their own employees — have to answer for that.”
During the second Trump administration, journalists covering immigration raids and subsequent protests have also faced increased risks of arrest and detention along with physical force, with journalists of color and immigrant reporters facing higher risk: Wilmer Solano Dávila, a Venezuelan journalist working in Florida, was arrested and detained at the end of July; Mario Guevara, an El Salvador-born journalist and asylum-seeker, was arrested while covering a “No Kings” rally and was eventually deported; Black journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were arrested and detained while covering a protest inside a church in Minneapolis.
Jenna Ruddock is the advocacy director at Free Press, a nonprofit focused on how media and technology can work to advance democracy, and said via email that USA Today Co.’s leadership should listen to its workers’ unions demands to cut ties with Palantir.
“Palantir is actively working to build a future of total surveillance that is fundamentally incompatible with a free press and human rights, as their tools enable state surveillance and violence both at home and abroad,” Ruddock said. “This company is actively extracting and commodifying public information in ways that violate civil and privacy rights.”
Related: Reporting on ICE killings follows a long history of normalizing state violence
USA Today Co.’s vice president of labor relations Amy Garrard said via email the agreement with Palantir is a “business decision” and will focus on connecting and better serving “audiences, advertisers, and subscribers.”
“Our data remains protected under our existing privacy commitments, contractual safeguards, and applicable laws,” Garrard said.
But Ethan Fauré, who researches anti-immigrant movements and authoritarianism at Political Research Associates, said concerns about the partnership tap into broader fears people have about mass surveillance. They pointed to the rise of conversations about how the data from automatic license plate readers, namely Flock cameras, is used.
“Palantir is serving as a key figure in the broader mass collection of data we all live in,” they said. “It’s deeply troubling, but … characteristic of Palantir’s operations generally, they don’t provide a lot of insights or transparency around what it is their technology actually does.”
“Audiences, advertisers, and subscribers,” but not workers
Workers found out about the Palantir partnership 20 minutes before the call, and Davis called the decision the latest in the series of examples of USA Today Co. “diving headfirst into AI with little regard for the public or its workers.”
USA Today Co. journalists have long wrestled with the company’s decisions on generative AI, from the AI-generated sports writing that was put on pause in 2023 to the subsequent AI sports editor and reporter positions it opened the following year, early conversations about generative AI use in union contracts, and a product review site likely filled with AI-generated reviews.
Even prior to widescale adoption of generative AI, the company has also come under fire for not paying staffers working overtime and creating gaps in local news landscapes to mitigate debt after its merger with Gatehouse. By 2023 it had shed nearly half its workers post-merger.
Newsroom involvement with generative AI has also been a flashpoint for other unions in contract bargaining. The NewsGuild-CWA, which represents 27,000 workers across North America, currently has a platform of demands — News Not Slop — focused on guardrails around the implementation and use of the technology.
Related: Should journalism have an industry-wide ethics policy for covering artificial intelligence?
The past few years have seen the growth of media and tech company partnerships. Palantir has worked with Fox News to build AI tools for its newsroom, while media company Axel Springer, which owns Politico and Business Insider, uses Palantir’s software to gain “detailed insights into readership behaviour, advertising performance, and subscription models.” OpenAI has invested millions into local news for similar data services while signing deals with news and magazine companies like Condé Nast to expand the reach of its generative AI products.
As a reporter and union organizer, Davis says he has two main priorities when it comes to generative AI and other new technologies: making sure executives are not introducing technology that makes journalists’ jobs expendable and making sure when and if AI is used, it is used in ethical ways.
“Partnerships with companies like Palantir and other ones, that’s sort of where I look at them,” he said. “I would think, just knowing that Palantir is a major player in the news, that presents an obvious inherent conflict of interest.”
James Salanga is the co-director of The Objective.
This piece was edited and copy-edited by Marlee Baldridge.
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