All this week Ideastream is exploring how AI impacts the people who call Northeast Ohio home. Ideastream Public Media’s Amy Eddings asked News5 Cleveland to demonstrate how it uses and oversees the technology.
I met News5 news director Jodie Heisner at the WEWS studio in Cleveland at East 30th Street and Euclid Avenue, a few blocks east of the Idea Center. I asked her whether News5 has an AI policy.
“We do,” she said. “Not only does News5 have an AI policy, our company, E.W. Scripps, has an entire AI governance committee. They have an entire leadership team that is dedicated to approving uses of AI, approving AI agents. And we actually even have our own dedicated internal platform for AI use, which is the only approved AI agent that our journalists use.”
AI agents are like digital assistants. They show reasoning, planning and memory. And each is designed to perform different tasks. Heisner logged in to Scripp’s AI portal, Engine Room. A grid of apps popped up on her computer screen.
“You're going to see things that are familiar like ChatGPT or Gemini, then you're gonna click into the specific agents that have been created just for us and are proprietary,” she said.
She hovered her cursor over one titled Styles and Ethics FAQ and explained what it does.
“You can enter your script in there. It's going to take our Scripps News Ethics and Guidelines, it's gonna review your script to see if it's meeting those. This is, again, [is] a stop down before you get to your manager to make sure all those P's and Q's are taken care of,” she said.
Research by The Poynter Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on improving the relevance, value and ethical practices of journalism, and Trusting News, a nonprofit research and journalism training organization, found most Americans want newsrooms to have ethical guidelines for AI and to be transparent about its use.
I asked Heisner if News5’s newsroom discloses its use of AI.
“For our newsroom, I think it's important to say that we utilize AI as a tool to enhance our journalism, but not to create our journalism,” Heisner said. “So, while we may be utilizing it for things like ideation, we are not utilizing AI to create journalism or articles or any of those things or images or video, with an exception. We have used it on occasion to show some of those examples that are in the news, right? So, showing that example of how scarily easy it can be to duplicate somebody's voice. And we disclose, yes, both online and in our newscast that we generated these just to show you how easy it is to use.”
Disclosure can work for and against a news organization, according to another survey by Trusting News in 2025. While 94% of news consumers said they wanted journalists to tell them when they used AI in a story, 42% reported a loss in trust in that story when AI use was disclosed.
The report concluded that this wariness may change if journalists explain how they utilize AI and offer examples of responsible use, as Heisner was willing to do. And Americans may become less worried about AI in the newsroom as they grow more familiar with the technology.
I asked Heisner what the future will look like for AI in journalism and in the News5 newsroom.
She said she couldn’t answer that question.
“The goal to meet people where they are is ever-changing and evolving,” Heisner said. “Where I hope we are is wherever the viewers are, especially when we look at local news. What I do continue to see as a driver is that connection to community. That is gonna be an important thing, knowing that real people who really live here, who really care about Northeast Ohio, are the ones reporting on these things.”
I reached out to other local news organizations to find out whether they have AI policies, how AI is used, and whether the use is disclosed.
Cleveland.com / The Plain Dealer Editor Chris Quinn chose not to be interviewed but has said in editorials that AI is being used to identify stories, correct grammatical errors and misspellings, and create stories from its daily news podcast, all with human oversight. Quinn also plans to hire an AI rewrite specialist to ingest notes from some of its journalists and write stories based on their reporting.
Signal Akron, Signal Cleveland, the Medina Gazette, the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram and Ohio Capital Journal say they do not use AI now but are developing AI policies.
The Akron Beacon Journal, Crain’s Cleveland, WKYC 3News, and WJW Fox8 declined to talk about their AI use at the request of their parent companies.
WOIO Cleveland19 declined my interview request.
Ideastream Public Media’s AI policy states, in part, that the newsroom “will only consider using AI that expands human capabilities over automation that could displace jobs.” The stated aim is to use AI to create workflow efficiencies. And any information generated by AI is verified by a human for accuracy, plagiarism, sourcing, and alignment with Ideastream’s “values, quality standards and ethics.”
AI policies are part of Ideastream’s Editorial Ethics and Guidelines, which you can read here.
