Journalism’s new assembly line
Cleveland.com hints at the new workflow: humans report, AI drafts, humans approve. The real fight is over craft, not just speed.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s “AI rewrite specialist” story has gone properly viral, and for understandable reasons. But the backlash misses the more interesting shift: it’s not just AI spitting out copy, it’s the deliberate separation of reporting from writing, with humans pushed upstream into sourcing and story-shaping while machines handle the first draft. That can buy time, or it can quietly break the apprenticeship that makes great journalists. Let’s talk about it.
A MESSAGE FROM THE MEDIA COPILOT
The Media Copilot is partnering with H2K Labs for RevvedUp 2026, and it’s shaping up to be one of the more substantive gatherings for people focused on the future of marketing, media, and technology.
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What critics get wrong about Cleveland.com’s AI rewrite experiment
If you’ve been even half-watching AI lately, you’ve probably run into Matt Shumer’s “Something Big Is Happening” essay,or, at minimum, the tidal wave of takes it kicked up. Shumer’s basic claim is simple: his own coding workflow has shifted from writing code to prompting, reviewing, and signing off on AI output that’s close enough to “done” to feel uncanny. It’s framed as a warning to knowledge workers everywhere: AI has effectively absorbed my job, and yours is next.
There’s already a small library’s worth of response essays picking apart what Shumer gets right and where he leaps too far, and I’m not trying to add another spine to the shelf. But journalism is knowledge work, too, and it recently had its own—slightly less viral—brush with the same existential questions.
The editor of Cleveland.com (a.k.a. The Cleveland Plain Dealer), Chris Quinn, wrote a column describing how a college student who had applied for a reporting job withdrew their application when they found out how the publication uses AI. Besides leveraging the tech to help generate story ideas, the newsroom developed an “AI rewrite specialist” to write stories based on the material that reporters gather. By ditching writing, according to Quinn, their reporters have been able to reclaim an extra workday each week.
The backlash was predictably vicious. On X, Axios reporter Sam Allard earned a lot of likes by comparing what Cleveland.com is doing to being an “AI content farmer,” while various veteran journalists on Substack expressed various degrees of outrage and dismay. Most of the reaction was along the lines of this piece from journalist Stacey Woelfel: “Writing is an integral part of the reporting process.”
The newsroom’s new fault line
That last line is true, but it’s also not the whole story.
Read the rest at mediacopilot.ai
She’s building an AI that replaces your news feed, your analyst, and maybe your morning routine
We are entering a phase where AI is rapidly becoming the front door to information. People are increasingly asking chatbots instead of searching, skimming summaries instead of reading articles, and expecting answers tailored to their interests rather than curated for the masses.
But personalization has a dark side. Systems optimized for attention can amplify outrage, misinformation, and echo chambers.
Eva Cicinyte argues for a different model. One that optimizes for understanding instead of engagement.
Cicinyte is the co-founder and CEO of Gnomi, and this week on The Media Copilot podcast she joins host Pete Pachal to talk about how the app's news agent is designed to synthesize global information into actionable understanding.
Cicinyte’s path to building Gnomi began in political data analytics, where she witnessed firsthand how information can shape decisions at the highest levels and how easily it can also distort them. That experience led her to a mission that sounds ambitious and deeply human at the same time: make high quality understanding accessible to everyone, not just institutions with research teams.
You can listen to the podcast on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or other podcast platforms. You can also watch on The Media Copilot YouTube channel.