ProPublica’s entire thing is holding the powerful accountable. They’ve won Pulitzers doing it. So when 150 of their own journalists walked off the job last week — the first major U.S. newsroom strike partly over AI protections — the irony wasn’t subtle. The people who spend their careers investigating corporate abuse had to picket their own employer just to get basic contract negotiations moving after two years of management stalling.
Two years. ProPublica sat across the table from the union representing the reporters who generate all the prestige and all the revenue and refused to budge on wages, AI guardrails, or the pay gap between their D.C. reporters and local journalists earning a fraction of that. ProPublica pulled in $90 million in donations last year. They’re not broke. They just decided their workers weren’t worth the conversation.
This is the pattern everywhere now. Companies don’t fire people in one dramatic moment — they stall and let contracts rot until workers have no choice but to walk. Then management acts shocked. ProPublica should know this story by heart. They’ve reported it a hundred times. Turns out the call was coming from inside the house.