When the nation’s largest newspaper chain announced a deal with Palantir in August, USA Today Co. CEO Mike Reed framed it as a necessary modernization step for a print-heavy publisher. The company, which operates USA Today and more than 200 local publications, still generates $1.1 billion in annual print revenue, but faces the same circulation declines and changing digital habits battering the rest of the industry.
Reed laid out the AI-fueled vision at a Palantir conference last month. The company wants to consolidate years of fragmented reader data into a single system and use AI to personalize newsletters, target affiliate links, improve content discovery, and turn anonymous visitors into registered subscribers. Demoing the platform with an “anonymized” user named “Marcus,” Reed described a continuous feedback loop built around reader behavior. “We’re actually an intelligence organization now,” he said, “because of the shift to online and the data we have on consumers.”
The reaction from the company’s journalists was swift and, perhaps, unsurprising. The deal, announced during an August investor call and first reported by Nieman Lab , prompted a revolt across 31 unionized newsrooms represented by the NewsGuild-CWA. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement creates a conflict for reporters covering immigration enforcement and protests, while raising questions about reader data and public trust. In addition to a booming commercial business, Palantir—fronted by its chest-thumping CEO Alex Karp —also holds billions of dollars in federal contracts, including for the Defense Department’s flagship data fusion platform. “Every problem we have with this partnership really comes down to trust,” Mike Davis, an investigative reporter at the Asbury Park Press, told Straight Arrow News .
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