In the week after Poynter published its investigation into extensive plagiarism found on a network of local news sites, the artificial intelligence company behind those sites lost a major client and fired the remaining contractor on the project.
Nota, which is known in the media industry for building AI-powered tools for newsrooms, had launched 11 of its own news sites in September in an effort to bring local coverage to “underserved” communities. But after Axios and Poynter found dozens of articles that copied the reporting, writing and photography of other journalists, the company closed the sites March 31.
Articles on the sites — collectively known as Nota News — were supposed to be based on public information like press releases and city council meeting videos. But for months, the two editors in charge of the sites had taken articles from local outlets, run them through Nota’s tools and published the resulting stories under their own bylines. Work from at least 53 journalists across 29 outlets appeared in Nota News articles without attribution, according to a Poynter analysis.
The plagiarism Poynter found on Nota News was contained to that project. But it has raised broader questions about trust, transparency and how AI tools are used inside newsrooms.
Those concerns are already having consequences. Some Nota clients are reviewing their relationships with the company. The tools and large language model that Nota markets out to newsrooms are the same ones that Nota News contract editors used to generate plagiarized articles. At least three of Nota’s clients had content plagiarized from their news sites.
The day after Poynter published its findings, leaders at The Boston Globe — one of Nota’s most high-profile clients — instructed staff to stop using Nota products while it worked to end its contract with the company. Globe leaders told staff in the April 3 email that the newspaper was not part of the Nota News initiative and that its usage of Nota’s tools was limited to generating “SEO, headline recommendations, related metadata, and social platform suggestions for Globe stories.”
“That said, what happened here does not fit with our values, and we are asking everyone to stop using this product while we wait for Nota to turn off the service and end our contract,” read the note to staff, which was first reported by Media Nation.
The Institute for Nonprofit News, a Nota client that negotiated special discounts for its members and has promoted the company’s products, said it shared Poynter’s story with members “so that they are aware of the concerns with Nota’s actions.” (INN uses Nota’s summarization technology to help distribute its members’ content and to power its texting service for rural newsrooms. Human editors review the output, and it does not use Nota’s article generation tool.)
Malea Hargett — the editor of the weekly newspaper the Arkansas Catholic, which is also a Nota client — said she took the concerns surrounding plagiarism “seriously” and would be conducting a review.
“Our newspaper uses Nota’s plugin solely for headline suggestions and SEO optimization — not to generate or publish news content. We do not use AI to write or republish reporting, and all published content on our site is produced by our own reporters,” said Hargett, who is also a member of the Catholic Media Association’s media ethics committee. “I will certainly be reviewing these accusations against Nota.”
Nota CEO Josh Brandau has repeatedly stated that the Nota News sites were an “experiment” not meant to be seen by the public and that the plagiarism issues stemmed from human error by the contractors involved. (Some of the messaging around the initiative — including promotion of the project via a press release, on LinkedIn and in an interview with The Wall Street Journal — contradicts the idea that the sites were not meant to be public.)
“From the beginning, we have been transparent that this issue was not related to AI or Nota’s software products but involved contractor plagiarism on a limited internal test project,” Brandau wrote in an emailed statement. “We take full responsibility for the oversight failure that allowed this to occur, have addressed it as an internal HR and management matter, and have shut down the project. No data was used for model training.
He added that the company’s focus “remains on supporting newsroom partners with technology and innovation that help them better serve their audiences.”
Some clients are sticking with Nota, finding value in the company’s products. Bob Conrad, publisher and editor of the digital outlet This Is Reno, said that after news about the plagiarism broke, he reached out to Nota. The company told him that his outlet’s data had not been affected and that the plagiarism issue was due to “a contractor.”
“I think generally it’s a good product,” Conrad said. This Is Reno uses Nota’s tools to help generate slugs, page titles, page descriptions and excerpts. “That works pretty well for us and saves us considerable time.”
Other outlets had already ended or declined relationships with Nota before news of the plagiarism broke. Many of those outlets are still listed on Nota’s customers page.
The Philadelphia Inquirer and KUOW in Seattle said they had tried Nota’s tools last year but decided against using them.
CT Mirror in Connecticut said it gave notice to end its contract in January after staff failed to adopt its tools into their workflow.
Nashville Public Radio said outright that it was not a client of Nota’s.
All four outlets’ logos appear on Nota’s website.
A spokesperson for Stuff, a New Zealand news outlet, said in an emailed statement that the company was unaware its logo remained on Nota’s website. “Stuff ran a small one-month trial with Nota AI in mid 2025. After evaluation, the decision was made not to proceed with the tool due to efficiency and accuracy concerns. No content data was made available for Nota’s training purposes.”
Asked about Nota’s customers page, Brandau said the company does not comment on client matters.
None of the eight media organizations that answered Poynter’s questions about giving Nota permission to train its tools on their data said they had done so. (Dozens more did not respond to Poynter’s questions.)
Brandau had previously told Poynter that the company built its large language model Polaris by training open source models against each other before refining them using “high quality journalism” provided with permission by the company’s clients.
That arrangement is highly unusual. Typically, AI companies pay news organizations for access to their content — not the other way around. Meta, for example, signed a $150 million deal last month with News Corp that would allow it to use content from certain News Corp-owned outlets like The Wall Street Journal to train its tools for the next three years.
Before they were fired, the Nota News editors said they were praised for their work
Shortly after Axios Richmond reported on March 30 that two of the 11 sites Nota News had contained copied work, Nota fired Jorge Rodríguez, the contractor responsible for those sites. On April 7, after Poynter published its report, Nota terminated the other contractor involved, Isabella Rolz.
Rolz, who was the editorial director of Nota News, had been producing stories for six of the 11 sites since June. Poynter found her byline attached to 41 stories that contained writing and reporting copied from other outlets without attribution.
In her first interview since news about the plagiarism broke, Rolz apologized for taking content from other journalists. That had never been her “intention,” she said, though she acknowledged that she had published unattributed work under her own byline.
(Rodríguez, the contractor whose byline appeared on 30 of the plagiarized stories Poynter found, has previously apologized for using content from other journalists. He said he was unaware the sites were public and that Nota lacked clear editorial guidelines.)
Rolz said she participated in the project to inform readers in smaller communities. As a bilingual journalist, she especially took pride in her work producing Nota News stories in both English and Spanish. On LinkedIn, she received messages from people stating they were glad that she was writing in Spanish, suggesting that the news sites were reaching an audience. (Brandau has asserted that the sites did not have any readers.)
“I’m so sorry for the reporters that were affected,” Rolz said. “There was no document that said what we were supposed to do or not, and we were told that we were doing great. So that’s why we kept on doing what we were doing.”
Rolz said that she saw her Nota News work as an effort to collect different bits of news in one place for the convenience of readers. (While aggregation is a common practice in journalism, aggregators typically credit by name the reporters and outlets whose work they include — something Rolz did not do.) Rolz said her bosses at Nota praised her team’s work — a point Rodríguez also made in interviews with Poynter — and urged her to produce upward of 80 stories a week.
Rolz, who went to Columbia Journalism School and has written for traditional outlets like The Washington Post, acknowledged that she should have used her familiarity with journalistic ethics to properly credit the outlets whose work she was using.
“I was so into the pressure of delivering,” Rolz said. “I’ll be honest; I wasn’t even thinking about that.”
Nota sought an NDA before paying a contractor
When Nota terminated Rolz last week, it asked her to sign a nondisclosure agreement before it would process her last invoice, according to documents reviewed by Poynter. That is likely a violation of labor laws, according to two experts.
“I have sent you a Non-disclosure agreement via Adobe Sign,” reads the email sent to Rolz by a third-party service handling human relations for Nota. Brandau and Nota chief operating officer Evan Young were copied on the email. It concludes: “Please review and sign as soon as possible. We will then start working on your invoice.”
Mary Inman, a founding partner of Whistleblower Partners LLP, said telling a contractor to sign an NDA in order to receive the payment they are owed “seems very illegal.”
“Your wages are owed to you regardless of whether you sign an NDA or not,” Inman said. “Wages for past work due should not be contingent on having to sign something onerous.”
Vilmarie Cordero, a shareholder at Arch Legal who specializes in employment and labor law, said that a company refusing to pay a contractor could end up having to pay damages or penalties for breach of contract.
“They cannot require an NDA before payment,” Cordero said. “The non-payment of the services provided would be a material breach of their agreement … because their relationship is based on a contract.”
Brandau said the company does not comment on personnel matters.