The Plain Dealer, Cleveland’s largest newspaper, has begun to feature a new byline. On recent articles about an ice carving festival, a medical research discovery and a roaming pack of chicken-slaying dogs, a reporter’s name is paired with the words “Advance Local Express Desk.” It means: This article was drafted by artificial intelligence.
“This article was produced with assistance from AI tools and reviewed by Cleveland.com staff,” reads a note at the bottom of each robot-penned piece, differentiating it from those still written primarily by journalists. The disclosure has done little to stem the backlash that caromed across the news industry after the paper’s editor, Chris Quinn, published a Feb. 14 column lamenting that a fresh-out-of-college job applicant withdrew from a reporting fellowship when they found out the position included no writing — just filing notes to an AI writing tool.
“Artificial intelligence is not bad for newsrooms. It’s the future of them,” Quinn wrote, adding that “by removing writing from reporters’ workloads, we’ve effectively freed up an extra workday for them each week.”
On social media, industry veterans recoiled at the sentiment. Former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber called it “beyond dumb.” Axios reporter Sam Allard defended the applicant for “wanting to be a journalist instead of an AI content farmer.” HuffPost editor Philip Lewis wrote, “An editor for a newspaper encouraging ‘removing writing from reporters’ workloads’ should just resign.”
As once-robust metropolitan newspapers across the country lay off reporters, shutter bureaus and scale back ambitions, the 184-year-old Plain Dealer, known online as Cleveland.com, is at the forefront of an industry-wide push to reimagine journalism for the AI age. Outlets such as the New York Times, the Financial Times and The Washington Post have begun to incorporate the technology into parts of their journalism and experiment with interactive chatbots. But industry experts said the Plain Dealer’s use of AI to write entire news articles takes the paper into mostly uncharted territory.
Several current and former Plain Dealer staffers, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said in interviews that Quinn’s AI initiatives have caused consternation within the newsroom. “It’s existential,” one said about the push to adopt the technology, referring to a fear of technology automating the work of journalists. “You see your own mortality in this.”
Quinn, for his part, says his paper’s use of AI to find, draft and edit stories is a success story that others must emulate if they want to survive. “It’s a tool,” he said in a phone interview last week. “If AI can do part of our job, then why not let it — and have people do the part it can’t do?”
He added that the paper’s embrace of technology — including using AI to write stories summarizing its reporters’ podcasts and its readers’ letters to the editor — is already boosting its bottom line, helping it retain staff at a time when other newspapers are shrinking or even shutting down. Just 130 miles east of Cleveland, the 24o-year-old Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said in January that it will close its doors this spring.
Quinn, who has led the Plain Dealer’s newsroom since 2013, said its newsroom has shrunk from some 400 employees in the late 1990s to just 71 today. Over the past three years, Quinn has implemented a suite of AI tools with various purposes: transcribing local government meetings, scraping municipal websites for story leads, cleaning up typos in story drafts, suggesting headlines and helping reporters draft follow-ups to articles they’ve already written. He said he is particularly pleased with an AI tool that turns podcasts by the paper’s reporters into stories for the website, which he said generated more than 10 million page views last year. He has documented those efforts in letters to readers and sought their feedback.
But the paper’s latest experiment — using AI to turn reporters’ notes into full story drafts — has aroused indignation online and anxiety within the paper’s ranks.
In January, Quinn hired an editor to lead a new AI “rewrite desk,” modeled on a newsroom staple of yore: journalists who would take calls from reporters in the field and turn their interviews and notes into prose. Instead of employing wordsmiths for these pieces, the Plain Dealer is using a generative AI tool to draft the stories, which the human editor reviews and sends back to the reporter for a final review before publication.
So far, the paper is using the AI tool mostly for brief, straightforward stories from Cleveland’s suburbs in Lorain, Lake and Geauga counties, Quinn said — restoring some of the “hyperlocal” coverage the paper lost when it shuttered most of its outlying bureaus more than a decade ago. Quinn said the reporters tasked with covering these counties are now expected to file four stories a day with the help of AI.
Some are as simple as rewriting a press release, while others require more legwork: The reporter types up the notes and quotes they’ve gathered, then sends them to the rewrite editor, who prompts the AI to turn them into a full article draft for the editor and reporter to review and tweak as needed. In the time saved by not writing, the reporters are asked to do the kinds of reporting that AI can’t, like inviting a mayor or police chief to coffee.
Plain Dealer reporter Hannah Drown, who grew up in Lorain County, now relies on AI to help her cover her home turf. She said she broke and wrote a story about overcrowding at a high school thanks to an alert from an AI tool that scans the transcripts of school board meetings for newsworthy tidbits. That story, in turn, led to a bigger feature that she wrote on how rapid growth was transforming a small farming community and straining city services.
More recently, she filed her notes on the possible repossession of 41 county sheriff’s cruisers to the paper’s AI rewrite desk, which helped to turn them into a 600-word article that appeared on Cleveland.com.
“It’s tagging in my teammate,” Drown said. “I still outline the story. I still decide what the news is and what the tone should be.”
But four other current and former Plain Dealer journalists, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the growing reliance on AI has taken a toll on editorial quality and staff morale.
One recalled that the AI push went into overdrive in 2025 when the newsroom gained access to a paid version of ChatGPT and Quinn encouraged “unfettered use” of the tool. The result, the staffer said, is that the AI-generated stories they publish have minimal guardrails despite claims that they are thoroughly edited and fact-checked.
Quinn took issue with the claim that AI articles are published with few guardrails, saying every story drafted by AI is reviewed by a human reporter and an editor.
Another staffer said that AI tools risk turning the paper into a “content farm” while depriving younger journalists of valuable on-the-job training. A different staffer bristled at Quinn’s suggestion that AI could supplant tasks as transcribing, proofreading and copyediting stories, because the staffer worried that would mean eliminating newsroom positions. “That ‘busy work’ used to be someone else’s job,” the person said.
Some staffers said they have made efforts to incorporate the technology into their work but complained that the goalposts keep moving. One said that they were caught off guard when their annual performance review indicated insufficient AI use despite those efforts.
The Plain Dealer is not the first major media outlet to publish AI-generated prose.
But Felix Simon, who researches AI and digital news at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, said the Plain Dealer is among the first mainstream newsrooms he is aware of to experiment with automating the writing process in a systematic way. Simon’s research suggests that shift comes with risks to the paper’s credibility: In surveys, most people say they prefer human-written journalism to content produced by AI. But those attitudes could change if people find value in articles crafted with AI, he added.
“It strikes me as an interesting and valuable experiment,” Simon said. “If it will work out in the end, that’s a different question.”
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, several news organizations have had embarrassing public episodes of publishing AI-generated articles that contained fabrications, known as AI “hallucinations,” or had other problems.
In May, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer apologized after running a syndicated summer reading list that recommended nonexistent books and contained fabricated quotes from fake experts. In September, Business Insider and Wired retracted dozens of stories by a freelancer suspected of using a fake byline to pitch bogus AI-generated articles.
Quinn said the Plain Dealer’s AI rewrite desk has yet to suffer any such embarrassing mishaps. “We don’t trust the AI for any original stuff,” he said. “Humans are in control of every step of the process.”
Nick Diakopoulos, a professor of communication studies and computer science at Northwestern University, said AI has already proved useful as a tool for investigative reporters to gather and analyze data but the efficacy of using it to write in-depth news stories is unproven. If the goal is to produce more content cheaply, he said, AI could help with that. But today’s AI tools struggle with some key elements of good local journalism, such as evaluating the credibility of sources, understanding what matters to a given community and deciding what a story’s main takeaway should be.
“I am worried that if an organization like the Cleveland Plain Dealer comes to rely on AI for writing a lot of content, people are going to miss out on the nuance of what happens in their community,” Diakopoulos said. “They might have a good sense of what happened, but they won’t have a good sense of why what happened matters.”
Quinn said that’s why he has a human rewrite specialist directing the AI, and why the paper’s more in-depth stories are still written primarily by humans — at least for now.
“Part of the experiment is to figure out where to draw the line where stories become complex to a degree where using the rewrite specialist is not efficient,” he said.
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