USA Today Co. – Media Nation

USA Today Co. responds to my post on its relationship with AI surveillance company Palantir

I’m passing along this email I received from PR and corporate communications at USA Today Co. in response to my post about the newspaper chain’s deal with AI surveillance company Palantir, which has drawn protests from union employees.

Hi Dan –

I saw your piece published yesterday regarding USA TODAY Co.’s relationship with Palantir and wanted to reach out. Was there a reason you chose not to contact us for comment before publication?

In particular, I noticed the line: “From perusing the coverage, I’m not entirely sure exactly what Palantir will be doing for USAT.” Given that uncertainty, I was surprised that no effort was made to seek clarification from the company directly.

This initiative supports our broader strategy to strengthen audience relationships and create greater value across our business. In this work with Palantir, we’re leveraging AI to create a unified intelligence layer to serve our expansive audience better, deepen engagement, and drive growth across subscriptions, advertising, and e-commerce.

Our editorial decisions remain independent and are guided by our longstanding journalistic standards and ethics policies.

Please note, USA TODAY Co. complies with applicable data protection and privacy laws and maintains strong standards for data security and governance. We require this of our vendors and partners as well, reflecting our belief that safeguarding protected personal information is essential to our business and the audiences we serve.

Sharing a quote below addressing the open letter from the Guild/unionized employees which you can attribute to Amy Garrard, Vice President of Labor Relations, USA TODAY Co.:

“We respect that employees have a range of perspectives. Our agreement with Palantir is a business decision focused on strengthening how we connect and better serve audiences, advertisers, and subscribers. Our data remains protected under our existing privacy commitments, contractual safeguards, and applicable laws. As always, our journalism remains fully independent.”

Union employees at USA Today Co. protest a deal with ICE-enabling AI surveillance firm Palantir

*ICE agents on the streets of Los Angeles in 2025. Public domain photo by DHSgov.*

For USA Today Co., our largest newspaper chain, there is no bottom. Formerly known as Gannett, the publicly traded company is reviled in communities across the country for slashing its newsrooms. Now the chain is embarking on a venture that is sleazy even by its own low standards: a deal with Palantir, the infamous AI surveillance firm.

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As Frank Landymore wrote recently at Futurism:

The optics of partnering with Palantir — a company that provides military targeting software and wields a vast surveillance panopticon — are undeniably touchy. It’s worked hand in hand with ICE, secretly providing the agency a tool that scours citizen’s Medicaid and other government data to create a map of people it could potentially deport. It also supplies the Israeli military with an AI battlefield decision-making tool that can analyze enemy targets for elimination.

Now USAT’s employees are fighting back. Natalie Korach, reporting for the media-news site Status, notes that workers (sub. req.) at the company’s 31 unionized publications have signed a statement urging executives to “immediately end its partnership with the company,” citing Palantir’s work with the federal government. As Jon Schleuss, president of The NewsGuild-Communication Workers of America, told Korach, “It’s a company that is actively involved in highly sensitive matters that journalists are covering. Having that company now on the inside of the systems that the journalists use to then write about that company, I think is where the problem is.”

On top of that, Korach reports that USAT is embarking on yet another round of layoffs and buyouts.

From perusing the coverage, I’m not entirely sure exactly what Palantir will be doing for USAT. Korach writes that Schleuss says readers don’t want AI news content, but that doesn’t seem to be what this is about. Rather, chair and CEO Mike Reed told investors that Palantir will build an “intelligence layer” to “strengthen how we collect, connect and activate audience data to drive more effective and faster monetization across our platform,” according to an account in Nieman Lab.

Then again, as Darren Zullo reported for Boston.com last year, USAT is already using AI to generate stories. Because of course it is.

Update: USA Today Co. has responded to this post.

A ruling in favor of the Des Moines Register bodes well for defeating a bogus lawsuit brought by Trump

Even as major media organizations like ABC’s parent company, Disney, and CBS’s, Paramount, were settling bogus lawsuits filed by Donald Trump in order to demonstrate their submissiveness, an unlikely defender of the First Amendment has emerged: USA Today Co., which until earlier this week was known as Gannett.

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A federal judge on Thursday threw out a class-action lawsuit charging that Gannett’s Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer committed fraud when they reported days before the 2024 election that Kamala Harris held a three-point lead over Trump in Iowa. As you may recall, the poll results created a sensation, but they turned out to be wrong: Trump won Iowa by 13 points, which was about what you’d expect.

The class-action suit was brought by a resident of West Des Moines named Dennis Donnelly, who claimed that he and other Register subscribers were victims of fraud because the Register acted with “intentional deceit or reckless disregard,” according to Emma Brustkern of WFAA-TV.

The suit is similar to one brought by Trump himself against Gannett, the Register and Selzer (he later dropped Selzer from the claim), calling the poll “brazen election interference.” That is, of course, a ridiculous allegation. More than anything, pollsters want to get it right, but sometimes they get it wrong. And sometimes, as in the case of Selzer in 2024, they get it very wrong. As U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger writes in her decision:

No false representation was made. Defendants conducted a poll using a particular methodology which yielded results that later turned out to be different from the event the poll sought to measure. The results of an opinion poll are not an actionable false represention merely because the anticipated results differ from what eventually occurred.

Trump’s own lawsuit is likely to meet a similar fate. So good for USA Today Co., which has shown a stiffer spine than some other media companies. Rather than allowing itself to be used by the Trump regime as a way of weakening the First Amendment, it is standing up to authoritarianism.