In January, the Cleveland Plain Dealer - Ohio’s largest newspaper, founded in 1842 - hired Joshua Newman for a job that didn’t exist a year ago: AI rewrite specialist.
His role: take reporter notes, feed them into an in-house ChatGPT system, and turn the AI’s output into publishable articles. Newman came from LoneStarLive.com, where he covered University of Texas sports. Now he’s the human interface between a newsroom’s reporting and an algorithm’s prose.
Stories about ice carving festivals, sheriff’s cruiser purchases, and chicken-slaying dogs now carry bylines pairing a reporter’s name with “Advance Local Express Desk” - the paper’s signal that AI helped write the piece. Reporters covering suburban counties are expected to file four stories a day. Traffic is up. Staff morale, according to anonymous sources speaking to multiple outlets, is not.
How It Works
The workflow is more assembly line than newsroom:
- Reporters gather information - attending meetings, conducting interviews, requesting documents
- They submit notes to Newman
- Newman feeds the notes into Advance Local’s internal ChatGPT variant
- The AI generates a draft article
- Newman fact-checks and edits the output
- The original reporter reviews for accuracy, particularly quoted material
- The story publishes
Editor Chris Quinn designed this to free journalists from writing duties, letting them spend more time in the field. Leadership claims reporters maintained the same weekly story output while gaining roughly one extra day for on-the-ground work.
The paper focuses AI usage on brief, straightforward suburban stories - the kind that once fell through the cracks when staff shrank from 400 in the late 1990s to 71 today. Quinn argues this lets them cover communities that had been neglected for years.
The Criticism
The backlash was swift and loud.
Former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber called Quinn’s approach “beyond dumb.” Cleveland Scene’s Sam Allard labeled it an “AI content farm.” Philip Lewis at HuffPost said Quinn “should just resign.”
The American Press Institute criticized Quinn’s defense as “anecdotal,” noting he “failed to explain to readers how using AI improves the journalism.”
Inside the newsroom, the concerns are more specific. Anonymous staff told reporters that AI-generated stories “have minimal guardrails despite claims that they are thoroughly edited and fact-checked.” Others worry about what happens to junior reporters who never learn to write their own stories.
Writing, critics argue, isn’t separate from journalism - it’s where thinking happens. Will James put it simply: “Writing is thinking.” Remove the writing, and you risk removing the analytical and ethical choices that make journalism journalism.
Quinn’s Response
Quinn has been characteristically blunt. He dismissed critics as offering “uninformed outrage on social media channels” that he deliberately chose not to read. Adaptation is necessary, he argues. Those who resist will lack credibility.
“Humans stand behind everything we publish,” Quinn maintains. Jobs remain intact. AI is a tool, not a replacement.
But his defense has its own problems. Quinn initially claimed journalism schools ignore AI or teach students it’s inherently evil - a characterization contradicted by programs like Syracuse’s, which actively integrates AI instruction. He later praised Syracuse’s program and sent an editor there to teach students, undermining his own argument.
The Nuanced Take
Not everyone sees the Plain Dealer experiment as a disaster in progress.
Writer Dante Ciampaglia frames it as a modern rewrite desk - a historical journalism practice updated for 2026. Newspapers once employed rewrite specialists who turned raw reporting into polished copy. The AI desk performs the same function, just faster and cheaper.
The real threat to journalism, Ciampaglia argues, isn’t AI itself but the tech monopolies, advertising models, and venture capital that gutted newsrooms in the first place. The Plain Dealer lost 329 staff over three decades. AI didn’t cause that.
There’s also a case that AI works well for certain story types - brief, factual updates where style matters less than information - while being poorly suited for features, investigations, and stories requiring human connection.
The question isn’t whether AI should exist in newsrooms. It’s already there, whether acknowledged or not. The question is what role it plays and what reporters lose when they stop writing.
What Experts See Coming
The Reuters Institute surveyed 17 journalism experts about AI’s impact in 2026. Their forecasts paint a complicated picture:
Audiences will discover news through AI chatbots rather than visiting news sites directly. Traffic to traditional publishers will continue declining, regardless of what individual newsrooms do.
Verification becomes critical. As AI-generated content floods the web, newsrooms may shift their value proposition from producing content to verifying it. “Not content, but process,” as one expert put it.
Local news gets hit hardest - and potentially transforms most. Small newsrooms will adopt AI “primarily to become more sustainable,” but they’ll struggle with local stories and staff comfort levels.
Jobs will change, some will disappear. Young journalists express the most worry about displacement, while veterans focus on changing workflows.
The Bottom Line
The Plain Dealer experiment reveals a fundamental tension in how journalism thinks about itself.
If newswriting is a skilled craft that develops critical thinking, removing it from reporters’ responsibilities could hollow out the profession. If it’s a mechanical step that sometimes stands between good reporting and readers, automating it might let journalists do more of what matters.
The answer probably depends on the story. A 200-word update on a county board vote isn’t the same as a feature on community displacement. Applying the same tool to both misses the point.
What’s clear is that this won’t be the last experiment. AI is already embedded in newsroom workflows across the industry - for headlines, metadata, social posts, and now entire articles. The Plain Dealer is just the one saying so out loud.
Whether that honesty helps or hurts them remains to be seen. But for an industry that lectures others about transparency, there’s something uncomfortable about pretending the AI question will go away if we just don’t talk about it.