Cleveland.com editor Chris Quinn is defending his newsroom’s use of AI to write news stories, saying it frees reporters to spend more time on the street gathering information.
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Key Takeaways
- Cleveland.com’s Chris Quinn defends AI-written drafts to free up reporting time.
- He says the practice gives reporters an extra workday per week.
- Educators argue writing is integral to thinking through what the story is.
“By removing writing from reporters’ workloads, we’ve effectively freed up an extra workday for them each week,” Quinn wrote in a February editorial responding to a job candidate who dropped out after learning about the practice.
The approach has drawn sharp criticism from journalism educators and practitioners who argue writing is integral to the reporting process, not a separate task that can be automated.
How the system works
Quinn describes a workflow where reporters gather information in outlying counties, then hand off their material to what he calls an “AI rewrite specialist” that turns it into story drafts. Human editors supervise the final drafts, fact-checking and editing before publication. Quinn says the extra time allows journalists to have more coffee meetings with sources and conduct more interviews. This reflects a broader trend of newsrooms trying to figure out how to use AI as a newsroom assistant while keeping journalists in control.
The newsroom initially used AI to identify potential stories in distant counties, a use case Quinn expanded to more coverage areas.
Journalism schools push back
Quinn blamed journalism schools for the candidate’s decision to withdraw, saying they teach students “AI is bad” and create unrealistic expectations about “long-form magazine storytelling.”
Missouri journalism professor emeritus Stacey Woelfel pushed back in a Substack post, writing that “reporting is not just the act of gathering facts.”
“Writing is an integral part of the reporting process,” Woelfel wrote. “Not only is writing necessary to put all the facts we gather into a form audiences can easily digest, but the concept of what form the story will take starts even before we leave the newsroom to report.”
This highlights the importance of teaching journalists to use AI without losing critical thinking.
The broader context
Quinn noted the difficult job market for journalists, citing widespread layoffs across the newspaper industry. But Woelfel countered that “many of the job losses he cites are the result of media owners looking to have human workers do less and automation—including AI—do more.”
