For Josiah Scott, digital and social media manager at the Seattle Medium, the journey into local journalism began in the most uncertain of times. “My background really is in communication studies,” he explained. “I graduated from Western Washington University in 2020, and from there I was trying to see how I could get my start in communications. Really what my initial passion was in digital communication.” That passion quickly evolved into a career. After early work with Generation USA and the Microsoft Reach program, Scott joined the Seattle Medium, one of the largest minority-owned newspapers in the Pacific Northwest.
Since then, Scott has expanded the paper’s reach from a strong print tradition to a more ambitious digital future. “What they’re looking for is someone to manage the news on their website, pushing that news onto different social outlets and also onto their newsletter, and really grow their audience,” he said. “Before then they were not using AI, because AI was not part of the topic when I first signed on three years ago. In the past two years, we’ve been conversating more about AI and how we can utilize it in our newsroom—how we can use it in an ethical way, but also in a way that is really efficient and makes sense for us.”
Why Nota partnered with the Medium
For Evan Young, COO of Nota, the Seattle publication was an ideal partner. “We were introduced to the Seattle Medium team through the partnership we have with the Local Media Association,” Young said. “It just looked like a very amazing opportunity for us to bring our tools and technology to a publication that we knew could leverage it to do exactly what Josiah has talked about—build engagement in communities that matter to that publication.”
Young said Nota’s mission has always been about accessibility. “We at Nota have always felt like this industry has been underserved by technology,” he explained. “Our goal is to support newsrooms, big or small, with the latest and greatest technology in the space at an affordable price. Josiah has been an amazing partner, really showing value at the organization. He’s just been one of the most engaged folks from a focal point that we’ve had at our publishing partners.”
CEO Josh Brandau echoed that commitment. “We want to have the tools that we provide to quite literally the largest news organizations in America available to you as well, with the same quality that we provide them and just make it accessible,” he said. “Our model is trained only on high-quality journalism. Everything is completely assistive—nothing gets created without a person overseeing it. We want to allow you to focus on telling the story, and we do everything else from a distribution and optimization standpoint.”
Optimizing stories for impact
Nota’s tools integrate directly into newsroom workflows, whether through WordPress, browser extensions, or dashboard uploads. “We give you headline suggestions, excerpts, summaries, tags, pull quotes, and SEO optimization,” Young said. “A lot of really small publishers don’t have in-house SEO specialists. We give you keywords and trending terms that might help your article perform better. We also provide social copy you can use to amplify the article across all of your platforms.”
For Scott, the integration has been powerful. “Yes, we actually use WordPress,” he confirmed. “So you’re seeing like something that we typically do. We actually developed a specific AI voice for how we are pushing out our content. We have a specific way of how we engage with our audience with the voice feature as well.”
Young added that style compliance is built in. “The default we have baked into our tools is the AP style guide,” he said. “But you can create a tone that mimics the style that you write your headlines in, or your social copy in. We make it very simple to set that up with just some examples that you feel like fully represent the voice and tone of the organization.”
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Expanding social reach
Before adopting Nota, Scott said the Seattle Medium had to limit its social media presence. “Before we started utilizing tools such as Nota, we really limited the scope of how many social media tools we were using at a time because we had to manually go through for each tool,” he said. “But since then we have expanded ourselves over to LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads, X, and BlueSky. I’m really pleased that Nota has different ways of how they engage on different levels with different social media channels. It makes my job easier and helps me push out the content uniquely across platforms.”
But automation never replaces oversight. “I let machines talk to machines,” Scott said, “but you know, I’m best at talking with people. So I always try to make sure that what we’re pushing makes sense. It’s up to someone like me for the final check to make sure it is ethically done, correct, and accurate.”
Brandau noted that behind the scenes, the system is constantly evolving. “Every quarter or so the best practices for these social platforms and how people are engaging with them are evolving,” he said. “We’re retraining the back-end structure of how you construct the outputs per platform to optimize it to the best of its ability.”
Young revealed that social publishing will soon become even more seamless. “One of the things we have on our roadmap is the ability to schedule and post directly from our tool suite,” he said. “That would minimize your need for an additional social scheduler. We’ll also be pulling down engagement metrics so that you can understand how the content is performing across different platforms.”
Video and multimedia tools
Video has been a frontier for many local publishers, and Nota is investing heavily in that space. “VID is the very simple version of a video tool that you can use to create an output,” Young explained. “This just makes it super simple to create a very quick video asset you can publish on social.” For more advanced users, “VID Pro is a much more robust video editing environment. You can create custom templates unique to your publication, add transitions, audio, intros, outros, and generate multiple aspect ratios simultaneously.”
Scott has already begun introducing these possibilities to his newsroom. “Something like the Vid Pro and Vid I’ve actually been able to show our newsroom and say, how can we make this make sense for us?” he said. “Because we don’t just simply utilize a tool. We always try to see how we can adapt the tool to work for our benefit. With Vid and Vid Pro we are able to have our content be more accessible and be seen in different formats. People aren’t just engaging with words. They’re engaging with short-form video.”
Another tool, CLIP, offers automated video clipping and transcription. “We automatically live transcribe that video,” Young explained. “If you set up any keywords you want to listen for, we can automatically grab those clips for your review. You can then create reels or custom assets to distribute. This is great for school board meetings or interviews that you can then push to social.”
Tangible results
The results at the Seattle Medium have been striking. “For our digital reach on our website, we have about 70 to 100,000 people per month with spikes around the fall when we start our sports section,” Scott said. “We actually were able to improve our newsletter subscribers by 228%. That is because of the initiatives we do through various campaigns throughout the year. We’ve been utilizing the Nota tool to free up more time for us to have those kind of ideas, but also to push people back to our website.”
Brandau connected these outcomes directly to revenue. “This is a direct revenue-driving tool,” he said. “You can convert notes into a real article, syndicate that article, create more articles. It increases the surface area of advertising. It increases the engagement you have with subscribers. That’s the greatest predictor of retention.”
Scott emphasized that newsletters in particular have become both an editorial and commercial asset. “When you have a newsletter, that is essentially a way of how you can show people who are looking to invest with you, looking to advertise with you, that it is a way of engagement for them as well,” he said. “You can already have an advertisement, and that leads to more opens and possibly leads to people going to that link. Those are another kind of ways to generate cash with you. That is revenue that goes back to your newsroom to keep doing the amazing work that you’re already doing.”
Ethics and evolution
Underlying the adoption of AI is a constant awareness of ethics. “We actually developed our terms and conditions on our website for the different tools that we’re utilizing,” Scott said. “You really have to monitor the outputs for the tool because AI is not perfect, just like people, and it could get it wrong. It is our duty to make sure that the outputs are correct and accurate. AI is not here to take away our jobs—it’s to make sure that our jobs are more efficient.”
Brandau stressed that newsroom adoption should be framed as empowerment. “Once you understand that these are just tools like Word was, then the conversation shifts,” he said. “This isn’t stealing your job. This is just helping more people engage with the work you do.
Young added that hesitation has consequences. “Taking a slower approach to addressing technology has been detrimental to a lot of the publishers that we’ve grown to know and love,” he said. “We’ve created these tools to make them very easy to implement, very simple to use, with a very low learning curve. If your complaint is you’re too small and don’t have time, we are literally building tools to help you give that time to do the things that you care about.”
For Scott, the result has been evolution, not compromise. “The core mission of the Medium is that we deliver a message from the people to the people,” he said. “With a tool such as Nota, we’ve been utilizing it as a tool. It is not a replacement in our newsroom. It is a tool to help amplify all the roles in our newsroom. Our soul has never left—it really has just been something that we have always been walking forward with. We’ve already been creating engaging content. Nota is really just helping us get that content out to the greater community"
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