A Contract Standoff, Falling Salaries, and the Growing Threat of AI
Italian journalists are walking off the job again. The Federazione Nazionale Stampa Italiana (FNSI), the country’s main journalists’ union, has called two new strike days, March 27 and April 16, in what is becoming an increasingly bitter standoff with publishers over a national contract that has now been expired for a decade.
The union’s language is stark. The contract has been expired for ten years, and salaries have been eroded by inflation, losing 20% of their purchasing power, a figure that would be scandalous in any sector, but carries a particular sting in a profession that frames itself as a public good. The FNSI notes that journalists are the only professional category still waiting this long for a renewal.
The stakes, the union argues, go beyond pay. President Sergio Mattarella has described the journalists’ contract as “the primary guarantee of the freedom of Italian journalists”, and the union is leaning heavily on that framing, presenting the dispute not merely as a labour fight but as a press freedom issue. What editors are trying to dismantle piece by piece, in this reading, is the very scaffolding of editorial independence.
The publishers’ conduct, as the FNSI describes it, is hard to read charitably. Editors collect millions in government subsidies, from this government and its predecessors, while investing little in their outlets or in professional journalism. Instead, they are pushing journalists into early retirement at 62, offering exit incentives, hollowing out newsrooms, and replacing staff with freelancers and VAT-registered contractors paid a pittance.
Then there is the question of AI. Publishers have refused to accept basic rules on the use of artificial intelligence, signalling their readiness to replace journalists, people the union pointedly describes as the real core business of any news operation. This is not a peripheral grievance. In an industry already battered by the collapse of print advertising, the fragmentation of audiences, and the dominance of platforms that monetise journalism without paying for it, the arrival of generative AI represents a third wave of disruption. Publishers, by the FNSI’s account, are treating it as an opportunity rather than a responsibility.
The publishers would tell a different story, of course. Italy’s media industry has been in structural decline for years. Circulation figures have collapsed. Digital revenues have not come close to replacing what was lost in print. Many publishers are genuinely fighting for survival, and argue that labour costs, including a contract framework they consider outdated and inflexible, make it impossible to invest and adapt. From their perspective, the contract renewal is not a deliberate attack on press freedom but a necessary renegotiation for a sector that looks nothing like it did when the original terms were agreed.
There is something to this, and it would be dishonest to ignore it. The media crisis is real. Newsrooms across Europe have shed hundreds of jobs in the past five years, and the pace has accelerated as AI tools capable of generating basic content at near-zero cost have moved from experiment to deployment. Editors are under pressure from shareholders and owners who see technology as a way to cut costs, something journalists understandably experience as a threat to their livelihoods and their craft.
But the FNSI’s point stands. The question of who controls how AI is used in newsrooms is not a technical detail. Publishers have also sought to ignore the law that requires them to pay journalists for editorial content transferred to so-called Over the Top platforms, the big tech companies that aggregate and distribute journalism without compensating its producers. At the table on fair compensation, publishers put forward a proposal even lower than the one rejected by the Council of State in 2016. That is not the behaviour of an industry acting in good faith.
The union’s closing argument is worth sitting with. How free can a journalist be when chained to an information assembly line? How straight can a freelancer keep their spine when paid by the piece? How secure will a staff reporter feel when stripped of basic contractual protections? These are not rhetorical questions. They describe the actual conditions under which a growing share of Italian journalism is produced, and they matter to readers as much as to the people doing the work.
The AI crisis has made all of this more urgent. If publishers are unwilling to negotiate rules that protect the role of professional journalists in an era of machine-generated content, the question is no longer just about wages. It is about whether there will be anything left worth calling journalism at all.
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