{"id":6729,"date":"2026-04-17T11:45:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T11:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/6729\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T11:45:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T11:45:11","slug":"news-organizations-reconsider-ties-to-ai-company-nota-after-plagiarism-findings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/6729\/","title":{"rendered":"News organizations reconsider ties to AI company Nota after plagiarism findings"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the week after Poynter published its investigation<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cunderserved\u201d communities. But after Axios<\/a> and Poynter found dozens of articles that copied the reporting, writing and photography of other journalists, the company closed the sites March 31.<\/p>\n

Articles on the sites \u2014 collectively known as Nota News \u2014 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s clients had content plagiarized from their news sites.<\/p>\n

The day after Poynter published its findings, leaders at The Boston Globe \u2014 one of Nota\u2019s most high-profile clients \u2014 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\u2019s tools was limited to generating \u201cSEO, headline recommendations, related metadata, and social platform suggestions for Globe stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat 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,\u201d read the note to staff, which was first reported by Media Nation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Institute for Nonprofit News, a Nota client that negotiated special discounts for its members and has<\/a> promoted<\/a> the company\u2019s products, said it shared Poynter\u2019s story with members \u201cso that they are aware of the concerns with Nota\u2019s actions.\u201d (INN uses<\/a> Nota\u2019s summarization technology to help distribute its members\u2019 content and to power its texting service for rural newsrooms. Human editors review the output, and it does not use Nota\u2019s article generation tool.)<\/p>\n

Malea Hargett \u2014 the editor of the weekly newspaper the Arkansas Catholic, which is also a Nota client \u2014 said she took the concerns surrounding plagiarism \u201cseriously\u201d and would be conducting a review.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur newspaper uses Nota\u2019s plugin solely for headline suggestions and SEO optimization \u2014 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,\u201d said Hargett, who is also a member of the Catholic Media Association\u2019s media ethics committee. \u201cI will certainly be reviewing these accusations against Nota.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nota CEO Josh Brandau has repeatedly stated that the Nota News sites were an \u201cexperiment\u201d 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 \u2014 including promotion of the project via a press release<\/a>, on<\/a> LinkedIn<\/a> and in an interview with The Wall Street Journal<\/a> \u2014 contradicts the idea that the sites were not meant to be public.)<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the beginning, we have been transparent that this issue was not related to AI or Nota\u2019s software products but involved contractor plagiarism on a limited internal test project,\u201d Brandau wrote in an emailed statement. \u201cWe 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.<\/p>\n

He added that the company\u2019s focus \u201cremains on supporting newsroom partners with technology and innovation that help them better serve their audiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some clients are sticking with Nota, finding value in the company\u2019s 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\u2019s data had not been affected and that the plagiarism issue was due to \u201ca contractor.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think generally it\u2019s a good product,\u201d Conrad said. This Is Reno uses Nota\u2019s tools to help generate slugs, page titles, page descriptions and excerpts. \u201cThat works pretty well for us and saves us considerable time.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s customers page<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Philadelphia Inquirer and KUOW in Seattle said they had tried Nota\u2019s tools last year but decided against using them.<\/p>\n

CT Mirror in Connecticut said it gave notice to end its contract in January after staff failed to adopt its tools into their workflow.<\/p>\n

Nashville Public Radio said outright that it was not a client of Nota\u2019s.<\/p>\n

All four outlets\u2019 logos appear on Nota\u2019s website.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for Stuff, a New Zealand news outlet, said in an emailed statement that the company was unaware its logo remained on Nota\u2019s website. \u201cStuff 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\u2019s training purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked about Nota\u2019s customers page, Brandau said the company does not comment on client matters.<\/p>\n

None of the eight media organizations that answered Poynter\u2019s questions about giving Nota permission to train its tools on their data said they had done so. (Dozens more did not respond to Poynter\u2019s questions.)<\/p>\n

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 \u201chigh quality journalism\u201d provided with permission by the company\u2019s clients.<\/p>\n

That arrangement is highly unusual. Typically, AI companies pay news organizations for access to their content \u2014 not the other way around. Meta, for example, signed<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Before they were fired, the Nota News editors said they were praised for their work <\/p>\n

Shortly after Axios Richmond reported on March 30 that two of the 11 sites Nota News had contained copied work, Nota fired Jorge Rodr\u00edguez, the contractor responsible for those sites. On April 7, after Poynter published its report, Nota terminated the other contractor involved, Isabella Rolz.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In her first interview since news about the plagiarism broke, Rolz apologized for taking content from other journalists. That had never been her \u201cintention,\u201d she said, though she acknowledged that she had published unattributed work under her own byline.<\/p>\n

(Rodr\u00edguez, the contractor whose byline appeared on 30 of the plagiarized stories Poynter found, has previously apologized<\/a> for using content from other journalists. He said he was unaware the sites were public and that Nota lacked clear editorial guidelines.)<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m so sorry for the reporters that were affected,\u201d Rolz said. \u201cThere was no document that said what we were supposed to do or not, and we were told that we were doing great. So that\u2019s why we kept on doing what we were doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 something Rolz did not do.) Rolz said her bosses at Nota praised her team\u2019s work \u2014 a point Rodr\u00edguez also made in interviews with Poynter \u2014 and urged her to produce upward of 80 stories a week.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was so into the pressure of delivering,\u201d Rolz said. \u201cI\u2019ll be honest; I wasn\u2019t even thinking about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nota sought an NDA before paying a contractor <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have sent you a Non-disclosure agreement via Adobe Sign,\u201d 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: \u201cPlease review and sign as soon as possible. We will then start working on your invoice.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cseems very illegal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYour wages are owed to you regardless of whether you sign an NDA or not,\u201d Inman said. \u201cWages for past work due should not be contingent on having to sign something onerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey cannot require an NDA before payment,\u201d Cordero said. \u201cThe non-payment of the services provided would be a material breach of their agreement \u2026 because their relationship is based on a contract.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brandau said the company does not comment on personnel matters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the week after Poynter published its investigation into extensive plagiarism found on a network of local news…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6730,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,6154,1428,25,1204,6155,6156,6157],"class_list":{"0":"post-6729","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ai","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-and-journalism","10":"tag-ai-ethics","11":"tag-artificial-intelligence","12":"tag-labor-issues","13":"tag-nota","14":"tag-nota-news","15":"tag-plagiarism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}