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The News Guild calls the deal a conflict of interest: Palantir is a company its own journalists cover. The publisher hasn't answered the union's data questions.
The News Guild, the union representing journalists at USA Today and roughly 250 other US newsrooms, said this week that its members are "shocked" by USA Today Co's newly disclosed partnership with Palantir and is demanding the publisher "immediately end" the relationship.
The journalists who cover Palantir for a living are now asking their own employer to stop doing business with the company. It is a working example of how a newsroom can turn a publisher's business decision into a journalistic conflict-of-interest fight, and how that fight actually works in public, through a union statement, a named spokesperson, and a list of specific asks.
The partnership surfaced through a Nieman Lab report that was then picked up by Futurism. USA Today Co, the country's largest newspaper chain by circulation and the company formerly known as Gannett, agreed to give Palantir access to its audience data in exchange for what the chain calls "actionable intelligence," a feed of behavioral, demographic, and engagement signals that publishers have spent the last decade collecting through subscriptions, registration walls, and on-site tracking.
USA Today CEO Mike Reed, on a recent earnings call, described the goal in business terms: building a "common intelligence layer" on top of the chain's reader data so the company can "monetize those relationships faster and at much greater value." The framing lines up with the news industry's broader AI pivot, in which publishers have argued that licensing reader data to model providers and AI platforms is the next major revenue line. The Poynter Institute confirmed the partnership and the union's response.
The conflict-of-interest argument is the part the Guild is leading with. Palantir is a data and AI software firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, and its tools are used widely by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and by the US military. The Guild's statement notes that its members have been "assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests," the same enforcement apparatus Palantir's software is built to support. Pairing a newsroom that covers that apparatus with a vendor that powers it, the union argues, fails the basic test of editorial independence.
The Guild is also asking USA Today Co to disclose the data terms: what exactly is being shared, how long Palantir can hold it, whether individual readers can opt out, and what security controls are in place. Reed's earnings-call framing was a description of the business case, not the data flow. The parent company has not, as of this writing, publicly answered the union's questions.
Palantir's public record sharpens the union's case. The company has signed multi-year contracts with ICE, has been linked to US military operations including strikes that, as Futurism reports and the Guild cites, killed more than 120 schoolchildren in Iran, and has drawn sustained criticism from immigrant-rights groups. Reed did not address any of that record on the earnings call; the partnership was pitched as a data deal, not a values one.
The newsroom pushback is showing up inside Palantir as well. Per the Futurism report, Palantir employees have started speaking up about the company's work, a separate and parallel labor-side objection to the same set of contracts.
What to watch: whether USA Today Co answers the Guild's specific data questions in writing, whether the union escalates beyond the public statement, and whether any of the chain's roughly 250 other Guild-represented newsrooms add their own on-record objections. Reed told investors the partnership is meant to make reader data a revenue line. The Guild is arguing the line is being drawn through the newsroom's own reporting.