Artificial intelligence company Nota — whose clients include organizations like The Boston Globe and the Institute for Nonprofit News — is scrapping its network of local news sites after learning that they contained dozens of instances of plagiarism.

The closure comes after Axios Richmond and Poynter alerted CEO Josh Brandau that multiple stories on Nota’s sites included reporting and photographs lifted from local news outlets. The 11 sites — collectively called Nota News — launched in September as an effort to bring “bilingual local reporting and civic tools to underserved communities,” according to a press release.

Each site focused on a specific county — or in one case, two counties — identified as lacking local news coverage. Until Monday, two part-time editors worked across the 11 sites, generating articles using Nota’s AI tools. The stories covered topics ranging from local affordable housing initiatives to public school events and were published in both English and Spanish.

The articles were supposed to be based on publicly available civic information, such as press releases and videos of city council meetings. In reality, Poynter found more than 70 stories dating back to October that included reporting, writing and photography from local journalists without attribution.

Some of the copied material came from outlets owned by Nota’s own clients. Nexstar, for example, had a $600,000 deal with Nota, according to Nota’s website. (Information about the deal was removed this week.) Poynter found three stories that included reporting from two Nexstar stations.

The episode highlights a growing tension in journalism: As AI tools promise to expand local coverage, they risk violating longstanding ethical standards and harming the journalists whose work they are trained on.

Nota took down several stories over the weekend after Axios Richmond reporter Sabrina Moreno reached out to the company about allegations of “stolen” content. On Monday afternoon, Nota terminated the editor responsible for those stories, Jorge Rodríguez. After Poynter reached out to the company, Nota took down the five sites Rodríguez had worked on later that night.

The next day, Nota took down the remaining six sites overseen by editorial director Isabella Rolz. In an interview with Poynter later that Tuesday, Brandau said the Nota News stories were supposed to be generated using publicly available information, not the work of other news outlets. He added that the sites were never meant to be public but were “live experiments” for Nota’s software.

“The fault absolutely lies with us in terms of keeping it open broadly to the web … so that potentially people could be exposed to it,” Brandau said. “Our intention was also to find ways in which we could take that civic information and apply it in a way in which it was digestible by a community, and that’s really as far as we thought about it in that respect.”

Brandau appeared to decide mid-interview to close the news sites for good. At the beginning of the conversation, he characterized the takedown as a “pause” made out of “an abundance of caution” while Nota conducted an internal review into the issues raised by Axios Richmond. Thirty minutes later, Poynter asked whether the sites would be made public again, given that they were intended as experiments.

“No, I mean, not until we get a structure in place that we could provide—” Brandau said before stopping himself. “No. Actually, no. I don’t think so. I mean, we’re reviewing internally what we need to be doing, but I think we can do all of that behind closed doors, if you will, because we don’t want to misinform the public, and we certainly don’t want to misattribute the companies and the journalism we serve.”

Rodríguez admitted to Poynter that he had used information produced by other reporters to generate articles for Nota News. He said he wanted to offer a “sincere apology” to the affected journalists.

Nota News, Rodríguez said, was not a “traditional newsroom environment” and lacked “clear” editorial guidelines.

“That context does not remove my responsibility. As a journalist, I should have applied my own standards regardless of the environment,” Rodríguez said in a prewritten statement. “I did not fully do that, in part because I did not see this as journalistic work at the time — and that was my honest mistake.”

Rolz, whose byline appeared on 41 of the Nota News stories Poynter identified as containing plagiarism, declined to comment.

It is unclear how many people saw the Nota News sites during the six months they operated. At least one person outside Poynter and Axios did. Daniel Woodruff, a reporter and anchor at KSL in Salt Lake City, said he’d heard about the Nota News sites covering Davis and Weber County in Utah but didn’t realize the sites had copied two of his stories until Poynter reached out.

“It’s always disheartening to see your work taken and posted somewhere else with no credit,” Woodruff said. “A lot of work goes into these stories, and there aren’t an unlimited number of journalists, especially at the local level. And it would be nice for any outlet … to give credit where credit is due.

“And that is to the local journalists that actually did the work and uncovered or unearthed the story.”

Nota said the sites weren’t public. Its rollout suggests otherwise.

Brandau and Rodríguez said Nota News was an experiment not meant to be seen by readers. But some of the company’s own messaging suggests otherwise.

“They weren’t indexed in any capacity on our site. They weren’t marketed. They didn’t have ads on them. We didn’t promote them in any capacity,” Brandau said. “They are and exist for a single purpose at this point, which is to understand in a real-world kind of scenario — or a mock real-world scenario — what we need to be doing, what the workflow looks like from a journalist perspective, where our tools could be improved.”

Yet on Sept. 16, Nota issued a press release touting the initiative, which included tech companies Microsoft, TollBit and BizBudding’s Springwire as partners. The release listed the URLs of all 11 sites.

“Each site provides daily coverage of government, schools, sports, and community issues in both English and Spanish, powered by Polaris, Nota’s media focused large language model, and overseen by Nota’s editorial team,” the press release reads. “Launching on National Voter Registration Day, each site also provides local voter registration tools and civic resources.”

Brandau confirmed that Nota put a widget on each site to let people know where to vote.

TollBit and BizBudding did not respond to a request for comment about their involvement. Microsoft directed Poynter to the press release. Brandau said neither Microsoft nor Springwire contributed funds to Nota News or made money from it, but he hopes to pursue revenue sharing with TollBit in the future.

On the day of the launch, Brandau wrote on LinkedIn that he was “excited” to announce the initiative and encouraged people to share it across their channels.

“On the front end, it’s a network of hyper-local news sites (soon to include newsletters, social posts, and video) that are nearly automated and available in English and Spanish,” Brandau wrote. “We’ve started in counties that no longer have local outlets, and expansion is underway. In just a few weeks, it will take less than ten minutes to launch a new site, with one bilingual Nota Editor able to oversee ten or more communities at a time.”

Dulce Ramos, a journalist who worked on Nota News until December, said she understood the project “was mainly to bring the news to … counties with no production of local news.” After the September launch, she said she assumed some readers might find the sites, even if traffic was limited.

On March 4, Nota News — along with outlets like The Philadelphia Inquirer and Axios — was featured in a Wall Street Journal article about using AI to expand local news coverage. Brandau told the Journal it cost less than $10 to produce a single Nota News story. He later shared the article on LinkedIn, writing that despite Nota being a software company, running a “news operation” keeps it “honest about what works.”

Asked about this promotion of Nota News, Brandau told Poynter he wanted to highlight the company’s efforts to develop a solution to shrinking local news coverage. He said the goal is to create a “software infrastructure” that Nota can provide to local newsrooms for “pretty close to free” so that they can use AI to cover routine stories while human journalists focus on “larger-scale, big J journalism that really impacts society.”

Before it was taken down, one of the Nota News sites, Sutter County News, included a page inviting readers to contribute money. It featured the note, “Every contribution strengthens local journalism,” and three options: $5 a month, $50 a year or a one-time $20 payment. Clicking any option led to a payment page where readers could enter their credit card information.

(Screenshot/Nota via Wayback Machine)

Brandau said that feature was also part of an experiment, tied to a tool called “Growth” that Nota is developing to help news organizations generate revenue. He said Nota did not receive any money through the page.

Rodríguez said he was unaware of the press release and that Nota told him the sites were not meant for the public, but instead served as a “digital brochure” to show clients how Nota’s tools worked. He did not view his work for Nota as journalism and drew distinctions between it and his freelance work for outlets like National Geographic and El País.

Rodríguez, a Guatemala-based journalist specializing in science and environmental reporting, said he would normally not accept a job covering an American county because it falls outside his expertise and interests.

He was recruited to Nota by Rolz, whom he knew from previous projects. (Rolz, who also grew up in Guatemala and is now based in Washington, D.C., lists freelance bylines in outlets like The Washington Post and The Daily Beast.) Rodríguez took the Nota News job as a chance to work on tools that he believed could help the journalism industry, not to practice the craft itself.

“If I wanted to produce journalistic content, I would go out of my way to do the interviews, to (re)search, to do the proposals,” Rodríguez said. “I wasn’t thinking about Nota in that way. I don’t believe Nota is a journalistic company at all.”

Nota’s tools repackaged local reporting without credit

Regardless of whether the Nota News sites were intended as a public-facing news source, the plagiarism Poynter found was far more extensive than previously reported.

Reporting from at least 53 journalists across 29 outlets appeared on the Nota News sites without attribution. The versions were lightly rewritten but largely kept the same structure and information as the originals. They appeared under the bylines of Rolz, Rodríguez and — in one case — “NewsDesk.”

Rodríguez confirmed that, as part of his work for Nota, he took articles from local news outlets, ran them through Nota’s AI tools and published the generated text under his name.

The result was dozens of articles containing typos, misquotes, missing context, awkward phrasing and misleading sentences — and work stolen from journalists who were actually local.

One notable example was a March 3 Nota News story reporting that the Utah state legislature had passed a bill on unlicensed day care facilities — two years after it actually passed. The KSL TV 5 story that it drew from was originally published on Feb. 29, 2024.

Woodruff, the reporter on the KSL story, said it took him hours to find sources, conduct interviews, write the story, prepare for television and then publish it online. Nota News copied much of his reporting and included without attribution quotes he had exclusively obtained.

“I’m not sure why they felt the need to publish that story now because almost everything about it is extremely out of date,” Woodruff said. “The lawmaker involved is no longer in the legislature. The bill that was up for debate and potentially being signed by the governor is now law. And nothing about it had to do with Weber County other than the fact that it was in Utah.”

When copying quotes from other news sites, Nota News typically removed references to the original outlet. When names did appear, they seemed to be errors rather than attempts at attribution.

A March 9 story by The Kansas City Star about four high school students facing criminal charges includes the following note: “The Star is not naming the students allegedly involved in the fight since they are not convicted of violent crimes and three of them are minors charged in juvenile court.”

The Nota News version, published later that day, included the sentence: “The Star is not naming the students involved because three are minors and none have been convicted of violent crimes.” Nowhere else in the story did it mention the Star.

At times, Nota News stories copied errors from the original articles. At others, it introduced errors. Poynter found several examples in which quotes were paraphrased or summarized but still presented in quotation marks. In other cases, Nota News added quotation marks to sentences that were not quotes in the original.

Beyond the more than 70 instances of copying from local journalists, Poynter also found multiple cases where Nota News took content from press releases without attribution and added errors likely generated by AI. All of the Nota News sites included a note at the bottom that they were “Powered by Nota News and Springwire.ai.” None, however, disclosed how the sites used AI.

One Nota News article about a library’s Women’s History Month programming shortened the artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s name to “Ga. O’Keeffe.” Another about the fourth birthday of a police dog spelled “K-9” as “K-nine.”

Brandau told Poynter that anything that could be considered misappropriation or theft is “not at all what (Nota) stand(s) for.” He said the company acted immediately once it became aware of the issues and would implement stricter guardrails and more oversight from senior leadership.

He added it was “probably important from an attribution standpoint” to note that the stories received “maybe three, six, nine views” each, which he said were likely from Nota’s engineers.

But that distinction does not matter under the law, said Chris Mammen, a partner at the law firm Womble Bond Dickinson who has experience in intellectual property and technology litigation. Copyright law protects original works of authorship, including photographs and written text, that are “reduced to tangible form.”

“Creating a digital copy of something is considered tangible form, and whether it has zero audience or a million people see it, the fact of copyright protection is the same,” Mammen said.

Whether copying text violates copyright law depends on how much was taken and how it was used, Mammen said. But the copying of photos is much more clear-cut.

Poynter identified more than 30 images on Nota News that were copied from other sites.

Nota’s newsroom clients were among those whose work it reused

Before launching Nota News, Nota was — and is still — known for developing AI tools for newsrooms. Those include “Brief,” which generates summaries and takeaways, and “Draft,” which generates articles from transcripts.

Nota’s website highlights dozens of newsroom customers, including Lee Enterprises, one of the largest newspaper chains in the country, and The Boston Globe. The Institute for Nonprofit News, which has 500 member newsrooms, is also a client and has a page on its website advertising Nota tools and discounts for its members. An INN spokesperson said the organization does not use Nota’s article generation technology and is “very much in favor of human editorial oversight.”

Some of Nota’s clients were among the outlets whose work appeared on Nota News. On every page of its website, Nota tells potential customers that it maintains strict standards to protect data and privacy. But the copying of client content raises questions about how those standards were applied in practice.

The Star, for example, is owned by McClatchy. A case study published on Nota’s website said McClatchy implemented a “comprehensive suite of AI-powered tools” to assist with tasks like generating social posts and search engine-optimized headlines.

Poynter found three Nota News articles that closely resembled stories from the Star and sent them to McClatchy. The company did not respond.

In January 2025, Nexstar chief product officer Jeff Moriarty announced on LinkedIn that the company was “expanding” its partnership with Nota across its local and national newsrooms, including The Hill and NewsNation. Nota’s AI tools would help with tasks ranging from headline recommendations to converting transcripts into articles.

The company did not respond to a request for comment about the three Nota News articles Poynter found that closely resembled stories from its stations Fox40 and WRIC ABC 8News.

Community Journals, the owner of several publications in South Carolina and a Nota client, said it was not aware that two of its articles had been copied on Nota News until Poynter reached out. The articles were originally published in the Greenville Journal.

Community Journals learned about Nota’s products through a conversation with the Knight Foundation, said Ryan Gilchrest, its director of editorial content. A Knight Foundation spokesperson said the organization does not recall that conversation and that neither Community Journals nor Nota is a grantee. Community Journals signed a contract last June and paid $99 per month for access to Nota’s tools, which its web team used to summarize longer news articles for its website and social media.

Community Journals decided a few weeks ago — before learning about the copied articles — to submit a 60-day notice to terminate its contract.

“We had just reached a point where we didn’t feel like we were deriving any significant work benefit from the tool, and so we cut the cost,” Gilchrest said.

Advancing technology has made it easier than ever to co-opt content, and Community Journals is no stranger to seeing its work improperly republished by news aggregators and AI sites, Gilchrest said.

“Although I think this is maybe the first case where we’ve seen it come up where it’s someone we had a business relationship with.”

Inside Nota News, there were no clear editorial rules or oversight

From the start, Nota News lacked the formal processes and oversight typical of a traditional newsroom.

“They don’t have anything on paper. They don’t have rules. They don’t have manuals,” Rodríguez said.

He worked with little oversight — no editors checking his work and no “clear editorial guidelines on how to handle or review content.” To generate a story, he found a source, ran it through Nota’s AI tools, looked it over and published it. To create a Spanish version, he used Google Translate.

The goal was to produce 10 to 15 stories a day. Nota leadership emphasized quantity over quality, Rodríguez said. At one early meeting, he asked how he should credit photos he found and whether he was allowed to use them at all.

“They said, ‘Don’t worry about that now,’” Rodríguez said. “So I didn’t. And that was my mistake.”

By the end of his time at Nota, Rodríguez said he was making $30 per hour.

Brandau said the issues involving copied content stemmed from a “failure of contractor journalists to follow our editorial standards.” Rodríguez said he was given a quota that was impossible to meet using traditional journalistic techniques, so he often Googled the county he was working on and used content — including local news articles — from the results that popped up. He said Nota never told him not to use local news stories and that he viewed his actions as finding additional sources for the company.

Ramos, by contrast, said she did not use local news articles. She strictly relied on official websites and public images. For stories about local board of supervisors meetings, for example, she took screenshots from YouTube streams and listened to the meetings to understand what was being discussed. On average, she produced 10 to 15 stories per week.

The tools and large language model used by Nota News staff were the same ones Nota marketed to clients. Asked whether Polaris, Nota’s large language model, could have been trained on the local news articles taken without permission, Brandau said no. The tools used by Nota News staff, he said, were not set to retain any information they submitted.

To build Polaris, Nota trained open source models against each other, Brandau said. Then it applied its own parameters and data-cleaning methods before training the model on “rights-cleared data” from Nota’s customer base. While Nota does not train its models on its customers’ data by default, some clients chose to grant permission, Brandau said.

“What that does is allow us to have models built for your use cases for journalism, so far less hallucinations on average than kind of an off-the-shelf LLM, even the best ones on the market,” Brandau said, “because it’s only training on super high-quality journalism.”

AI is pitched as a fix for news deserts. Journalists aren’t convinced

Despite Nota News’ decision to launch sites in counties that already had local news outlets, the news desert problem is real. Journalism jobs are fast disappearing, and outlets of all sizes are slashing coverage. A 2025 Medill study found that more than 50 million Americans live in areas with limited or no access to reliable local news.

To cope with declining revenue and an uncertain economic future, some newsrooms are turning to AI to cut costs — a move that has attracted controversy and ensnared some in scandal. The Cleveland Plain Dealer made headlines earlier this year when editor Chris Quinn wrote a column criticizing a job candidate who withdrew their application rather than use AI assistance in their writing.

Some local journalists said they are skeptical of the Nota News model of using AI to generate stories about public meetings and press releases.

“I think what you lose and what you miss is perspective because you don’t have journalists who know the backstory, who understand the community,” said Henrico (Virginia) Citizen publisher Tom Lappas. Nota News copied several of the Citizen’s stories and photos. “I’ve been here 28 years now, covering Henrico County. My managing editor has been here 30-something years. So we have perspective on all the things that have happened in that time that we can write into or edit into our articles.

“You’re not going to get that from AI.”

He added that under the Nota News model, where stories cost less than $10 to produce, there wouldn’t be time for someone to fact-check stories and watch a three-hour recording of a meeting to make sure that the AI tool was accurate.

A properly reported and fact-checked article, like those Nota News copied, can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to produce after factoring in the reporter’s time, the editor’s time and other expenses like public records charges, Lappas said.

What Henrico County needs is not AI-generated summaries of government notices, but more “in-depth, old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting,” said Dina Weinstein, a community vitality reporter for the Citizen.

And those stories might not be the big investigative projects that Nota assumes journalists would pursue if their time were freed up with the help of AI.

In talking about the four stories of hers that Nota News copied, Weinstein returned to one about a local bakery specializing in Mexican treats. In early January, videos of the bakery’s Rosca de Reyes cakes popped up on her social media feed. Seeing the hundreds of people enthusiastically responding, Weinstein knew she had to write about it.

“I love going out and interviewing people, especially people that… might not get a lot of coverage,” Weinstein said. “Or people kind of know about them, but maybe they don’t really, and it’s like, ‘I will take you there.’”

So she visited the shop, Dalia’s Ice Cream & Bakery. She interviewed the staff in Spanish. She tasted the cake. She took photos. She researched the county’s Hispanic population and its demographics. She drew from her knowledge of Mexican culture stemming from having family members who are Mexican.

The final story, published Jan. 7, included quotes from three sources, cultural context and original colorful photographs.

Nota News lifted nearly all of it.

This article was updated to include statements from the Knight Foundation and the Institute for Nonprofit News.