The week after Mr. Poynter released his findings into extensive plagiarism found on a network of local news sites, the artificial intelligence company that runs those sites lost a major customer and fired the remaining contractors on the project.
Nota is known in the media industry for developing AI-powered tools for newsrooms and had launched 11 of its own news sites in September to provide local coverage to “underserved” communities. But the company shut down the site on March 31 after Axios and Pointer discovered dozens of articles that copied other journalists’ reporting, writing, and photos.
Articles on the site (collectively known as Nota News) were supposed to be based on publicly available information such as press releases and videos of City Council meetings. But for months, the site’s two editors had been culling stories from local news outlets, running them through Nota’s tools, and publishing the resulting stories under their own bylines. According to Poynter’s analysis, articles by at least 53 journalists from 29 news organizations were published in Nota News articles without attribution.
The plagiarism Poynter discovered in Nota News was included in that project. But broader questions are being raised about trust, transparency and how AI tools are used within newsrooms.
These concerns are already having an impact. Some of Nota’s customers are reevaluating their relationships with the company. The tools and large-scale language models that Nota sells to newsrooms are the same ones used by Nota News’ contract editors to generate plagiarized articles. At least three of Nota’s customers plagiarized content from news sites.
A day after Poynter published its findings, executives at the Boston Globe, one of Nota’s most high-profile clients, instructed staff to stop using Nota’s products while they worked to terminate their contract with the company. Globe leaders told staff in an April 3 email that the paper does not participate in the Nota News effort and that its use of Nota’s tools is limited to generating “SEO, headline recommendations, related metadata, and social platform suggestions for Globe articles.”
“That said, what happened here does not align with our values, so we are asking everyone to stop using this product until Nota takes it out of service and terminates your contract,” the memo to staff, first reported by Media Nation, said.
The Institute for Nonprofit News, a Nota customer that negotiates special discounts for its members and promotes the company’s products, said it shared Poynter’s story with its members “to make them aware of our concerns about Nota’s actions.” (INN uses Nota’s summarization technology to help distribute content for its members and power text messaging services for local newsrooms. Human editors review the output but do not use Nota’s article generation tools.)
Marea Hargett, editor of the weekly newspaper Arkansas Catholic, which is also a Nota client, said she takes concerns about plagiarism “seriously” and will conduct an investigation.
“Our newspaper uses Nota’s plugins only 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 content on our site is created by our own reporters,” said Hargett, who is also a member of the Catholic Media Association’s Media Ethics Committee. “I definitely intend to review these charges against Nota.”
Nota CEO Josh Brando has repeatedly stated that the Nota News site was an “experiment” not intended for public access and that the plagiarism issue was due to human error by the contractors involved. (Some of the messaging around this effort, including promoting the project through press releases, LinkedIn, and an interview with the Wall Street Journal, contradicts the idea that the site is not intended to be public.)
“From the beginning, we have been clear that this issue does not involve AI or Nota’s software products, but rather plagiarism by a contractor in a limited internal testing project,” Brandau said in an emailed statement. “We take full responsibility for the oversight lapses that led to this incident, addressed it as an internal human resources and management issue, and canceled the project. No data was used to train the model.”
He added that the company “remains focused on supporting our newsroom partners with technology and innovation to better serve our viewers.”
Some customers continue to use Nota because they see value in the company’s products. Bob Conrad, publisher and editor of digital outlet This Is Reno, said he contacted Nota after news broke about the plagiarism. The company told him that his outlet’s data was not affected and that the plagiarism issue was caused by a “contractor.”
“Overall I think it’s a good product,” Conrad said. This Is Reno uses Nota’s tools to generate slugs, page titles, page descriptions, and excerpts. “This works really well for us and saves us a lot of time.”
Other media outlets had already terminated or rejected relationships with Nota before news of the plagiarism broke. Many of those retailers are still listed on Nota’s customer page.
The Philadelphia Inquirer and Seattle’s KUOW said they tried Nota’s tools last year but decided not to use them.
Connecticut-based CT Mirror announced in January that it had given notice to terminate its contract after its staff failed to implement the company’s tools into their workflows.
Nashville Public Radio clarified that the company is not a customer of Nota.
Logos for all four stores are featured on Nota’s website.
A New Zealand Press Staff spokesperson said in an emailed statement that she was not aware that the company’s logo remained on Nota’s website. “Stuff conducted a small one-month trial with Nota AI in mid-2025. After evaluation, it was decided not to continue using the tool due to efficiency and accuracy concerns. There was no content data available for Nota training purposes.”
Asked about Nota’s customer page, Brandau said the company does not comment on customer issues.
None of the eight media organizations that responded to Poynter’s questions about giving Nota permission to use their data to train its tools said they had given permission. (Dozens more did not answer Poynter’s questions.)
Brando previously told Poynter that the company built its large-scale language model, Polaris, by training open source models against each other, before refining it using “quality journalism” provided with customer permission.
That arrangement is highly unusual. AI companies typically pay news organizations for access to their content, not the other way around. Last month, for example, Meta signed a $150 million deal with News Corp that would allow it to use content from certain News Corp-owned news organizations, such as the Wall Street Journal, to train its tools for the next three years.
Before being fired, Nota News editors said they had been praised for their work.
Shortly after Axios Richmond reported on March 30 that two of Nota News’ 11 sites contained copied work, Nota fired the contractor responsible for those sites, Jorge Rodriguez. On April 7, after Poynter released its report, Nota fired another contractor involved, Isabella Lorz.
Lolts, who was editorial director at Nota News, had produced articles for six of the 11 sites since June. Ms. Poynter found her byline attached to 41 articles, including writing and reporting copied without attribution from other news organizations.
In his first interview since the plagiarism news broke, Lolts apologized for plagiarizing material from other journalists. She said that was not her “intention,” but acknowledged that she published unattributed works under her byline.
(Rodriguez, a contractor whose byline appeared on 30 of the plagiarized articles Poynter discovered, has previously apologized for using other journalists’ content. He said he had no idea the site was public and that Nota lacked clear editorial guidelines.)
Lortz said she participated in a project to bring information to readers in small communities. As a bilingual journalist, she took particular pride in her work producing Nota News articles in both English and Spanish. On LinkedIn, I received messages from people saying they were glad I was writing in Spanish, suggesting that the news site was reaching its audience. (Brandau claims these sites had no readers.)
“I am truly sorry to the reporters who were victimized,” Lolts said. “There was no documentation telling us what we should or shouldn’t do. And we were told we were doing well. So we kept doing what we were doing.”
Lorz said she sees the Nota News initiative as an effort to bring a variety of news into one place for the convenience of readers. (Aggregation is a common practice in journalism, where aggregators typically credit the reporters and news organizations included in their work by name, something Lorz did not do.) Lorz said Nota’s bosses praised the team’s work, a point Rodriguez made in an interview with Poynter, and urged her to produce more than 80 stories a week.
Lolts, who attended Columbia Journalism School and has written for traditional news outlets such as the Washington Post, acknowledged that he should have used his familiarity with journalistic ethics to properly credit the outlets for the work he uses.
“I was under a lot of pressure to perform,” Lolts said. “To be honest, I never thought of that.”
Nota asked for an NDA before paying contractors
When Norta fired Mr. Lorz last week, it asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement before processing his final bill, according to documents reviewed by Poynter. Two experts say this is likely a violation of labor laws.
An email sent to Rolz from a third-party service responsible for Nota’s relationships says, “We have sent you a non-disclosure agreement via Adobe Sign.” Messages from Brandau and Nota’s chief operating officer Evan Young were copied into the email. “Please review and sign as soon as possible, and we will then begin generating your invoice,” it concludes.
Mary Inman, founding partner of Whistleblower Partners LLP, said instructing contractors to sign NDAs in order to receive payments that are due “seems highly illegal.”
“Your wages are owed to you whether you sign an NDA or not,” Inman said. “Pay for past work that must be paid should not be conditional on signing onerous contracts.”
Arch Legal shareholder Villemarie Cordero, who specializes in employment and labor law, said companies that refuse to pay contractors could end up having to pay damages and fines for breach of contract.
“You can’t require an NDA before payment,” Cordero said. “Non-payment of services rendered constitutes a material breach of contract…because their relationship is contractual.”
Brandau said the company does not comment on personnel matters.
