Your Local Newspaper Might Be Written by AI Now
Subtitle: A 184-year-old newspaper in Cleveland is using ChatGPT to draft news articles. It’s working, the traffic is up, and the rest of the journalism world is furious. Here’s why this matters to everyone who reads the news.
Key Takeaways
- The Cleveland Plain Dealer, one of Ohio’s oldest newspapers, is now using AI to draft news stories from reporters’ notes
- A dedicated “AI rewrite desk” takes reporters’ field notes and turns them into published articles
- The system generated over 10 million page views last year
- Industry veterans, including editors at HuffPost and the Financial Times, have called the experiment reckless
- The Associated Press is now facing its own internal revolt over similar AI plans
What’s Actually Happening in Cleveland
If you’ve been reading stories on Cleveland.com recently about local ice carving festivals, medical research, or even a pack of chicken-slaying dogs roaming the suburbs, you might have noticed an unusual byline: “Advance Local Express Desk.”
That byline means the article was drafted by artificial intelligence.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer, a newspaper that has been publishing since 1842, started the experiment in January 2026. Editor Chris Quinn hired Joshua Newman as an “AI rewrite specialist,” a role that didn’t exist in journalism until now. The concept is modeled on an old newsroom practice called the “rewrite desk,” where one journalist would turn another’s notes into a polished article. Except now, the “journalist” doing the rewriting is ChatGPT.
Here’s how it works: a reporter goes into the field, gathers information, conducts interviews, and files their notes. Those notes get fed into an in-house version of ChatGPT provided by Advance Local, the newspaper’s parent company. The AI produces a draft. Newman reviews it, then sends it back to the original reporter for a final check before publication.
The Numbers Tell One Story
By the numbers, the experiment is working.
Quinn has been rolling out AI tools at the Plain Dealer for three years now. The suite includes transcription of local government meetings, web scraping for story leads, typo cleanup, headline suggestions, and podcast-to-article conversion. That last feature alone generated over 10 million page views last year.
Leila Atassi, the editor overseeing the AI rewrite desk, says reporters are maintaining their weekly story output while gaining roughly one extra reporting day per week. That’s a significant boost at a time when newsrooms across the country are shrinking. The Plain Dealer has managed to retain staff while other papers are cutting.
“This is the work of a real reporter,” Atassi told Columbia Journalism Review. “It’s real accountability. AI is the assistant, but it’s not the journalist.”
No errors from AI-drafted articles have reached publication, according to Atassi.
But Journalists Are Not Happy
The rest of the journalism industry reacted like someone had set a newsroom on fire.
Phil Lewis, editor at HuffPost, didn’t hold back: “An editor for a newspaper encouraging ‘removing writing from reporters’ workloads’ should just resign.”
Lionel Barber, former editor of the Financial Times, called it “beyond dumb.”
The American Press Institute said Quinn’s argument for AI writing “was anecdotal and full of unsupported generalizations.”
And then came the story that really stung: a fresh college graduate withdrew from a reporting fellowship at the Plain Dealer after discovering the position didn’t include any actual writing. The applicant would file notes to an AI tool instead. For many in the industry, this was the clearest sign yet that something fundamental was shifting, and not for the better.
The AP Revolt
The Cleveland experiment might have stayed a regional story if not for what happened next at the Associated Press, the wire service that supplies news to thousands of outlets worldwide.
After the Plain Dealer story broke, internal tensions at the AP boiled over. Aimee Rinehart, AP’s Senior Product Manager for AI, told staff that “resistance is futile” when it comes to AI adoption. She described a future where reporters gather information and feed quotes into language models that generate stories automatically.
Rinehart went further, suggesting many editors would “prefer to have reporters report and have articles at least pre-written by AI,” adding that reporting and writing are “distinct skill sets rarely found together.”
The pushback from AP journalists was immediate and sharp.
One AP reporter described management’s stance as showing “dismissiveness and disdain for human writing” that was “insulting and abhorrent.” Another said leadership exists “in a totally different reality than the people who wake up every day and do the work of reporting.”
The AP quickly distanced itself from Rinehart’s comments, stating the discussion “doesn’t reflect the overall position” of the organization and emphasizing its role as “an industry leader in setting AI standards.”
What This Actually Means for You
If you’re reading this and thinking “this doesn’t affect me, I don’t work at a newspaper,” think again. The Cleveland experiment is a preview of something much bigger.
The quality question. Every article you read online already passes through some AI. Search optimization, headline testing, summary generation, and translation are all increasingly automated. The Plain Dealer is just the first major paper to be open about using AI for the actual writing. How many others are doing it quietly?
The trust question. Journalism’s value has always rested on trust. A reporter who spent time at someone’s kitchen table, who walked the neighborhood, who attended the meeting, that reporter writes differently than a machine summarizing their notes. The AI might get the facts right (so far, no errors have slipped through in Cleveland), but does it capture what it felt like to be there?
The skills question. If new journalists never learn to write because AI does it for them, what happens to journalism in ten years? This is what the fellowship applicant’s withdrawal symbolized. It wasn’t just about one job. It was about a generation of reporters who might never develop the craft that makes great journalism possible.
The job question. The Plain Dealer says AI isn’t replacing anyone. They’ve retained staff while other papers shrank. But the AP’s internal vision of reporters who only gather information while AI writes suggests a future where far fewer journalists are needed. A study found that two-thirds of newsrooms using AI have not saved any jobs so far, but “so far” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
The Bigger Pattern
This is the same pattern playing out across every industry: AI enters as a “tool” that “helps” workers, then gradually takes over core parts of the job, while employers promise nobody is being replaced.
We’ve seen it with customer service chatbots that were supposed to “help” agents. We’ve seen it with AI coding assistants that were supposed to “help” programmers. Now it’s happening with the people who tell us what’s going on in the world.
The honest truth is that some of this is genuinely useful. Transcribing government meetings? Great, nobody wants to do that by hand. Scraping municipal websites for story leads? Smart use of technology. But drafting entire articles from a reporter’s notes? That’s not augmenting journalism. That’s replacing a core part of it.
What Happens Next
Cleveland’s experiment is early. The AI rewrite desk mainly handles short suburban stories right now, not the big investigations or the stories that require a writer’s voice. But technology always starts small. The podcast-to-article tool started as an experiment too, and now it drives 10 million page views a year.
Other newsrooms are watching closely. Cleveland’s competitor, News5, has taken a more cautious stance, stating that “AI should enhance, not create journalism.” But the traffic numbers from Cleveland are hard to ignore, especially for an industry that’s been bleeding money for two decades.
The question isn’t whether AI will be involved in producing the news you read. It already is. The question is how much of the human element you’re willing to lose, and whether you’ll even notice when it’s gone.
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