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 d…