I’m taking a risk by stating that I believe local journalism is about to enter a new heyday.
Crazy, huh? The demise of local journalism has been the subject of numerous articles. The digital revolution destroyed the advertising paradigm, drastically reduced the size of newsrooms, and left large regions of the country without local coverage.
It’s all true. However, as has frequently occurred throughout our species’ history, significant change can occur at the worst possible moment, and I think that is what is happening right now.
Our newsroom has grown into new issue areas, published more substantive pieces, and greatly enhanced the quality of our content during the past eight months.
By accepting artificial intelligence as a means to improve ourselves, we achieved this.
This year, I’ve written about AI in the newsroom on multiple occasions, and every time, I feel like we’ve advanced significantly. We’re using it to improve our writing, conduct more in-depth reporting, and provide fresh stuff that readers obviously enjoy.
It should be noted that after more than ten years of having to come to terms with the fact that local journalism had to give up certain beloved aspects in order to survive, I offer my positive opinion.
We had full desks of editors whose duty it was to find and correct errors in our text before the internet completely upended journalism. Typos. mistakes in grammar. holes that are leaking.
We had to give up the backstops when funds shrank. We committed to creating as much content as we could while we searched for a way to practice sustainable journalism in the digital era. People wanted to read many of the stories that were produced as a result, but mistakes propagated quickly.
Accepting the rise in mistakes was difficult. I had to bite my mouth every time I spotted a typo, grammatical error, or improper usage of terms like comprise. The way forward was not nitpicking but more storytelling.
Everything changed in the past eight months. We created Editors Eyes with colleagues at Advance Local, providing each reporter with a personal copy desk to check for typos and grammar mistakes prior to publication. It’s a part of every story you read here.
However, AI is improving our writing in a lot more ways. All of my writing, including this column, is fed into AI, which I ask to look for any structural problems. I ask it to look for any gaps or unclear information. Although I don’t always agree with it, I usually do. It clarifies what I write. This is what many of our correspondents are doing.
The writing in The Plain Dealer and on Cleveland.com is at its best in years thanks to artificial intelligence.
That only covers the mechanical aspect. The additional material is the true benefit of AI for our readers.
We have reporters devoted to covering Lorain, Lake, and Geauga counties for the first time in years. Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are acting as our eyes and ears, helping us spot possible topics that reporters may subsequently investigate and write about. Take Hannah Drown’s account of a Lorain County commissioner who wants to use billboards to shame child support scofflaws. After discovering it with our AI technologies, she blogged about it and reported it.
This has nothing to do with robots taking over our jobs. The work is done by Hannah. AI is unrelated to many of her stories. They are the outcome of a persistent reporter who never stops searching for interesting subjects. However, we have AI capabilities in place to ensure that she is aware of what is happening.
Our podcasts are also transformed into stories by AI. Every week, we generate 45 to 50 additional pieces by feeding the audio into our own program, adding prompts, and editing them extensively before posting. We began in March, and as you read this, one of them will have been read five million times. These stories are adored by readers.
The most recent AI extension of our material reminds me of a routine newsroom procedure when I started working as a reporter: nearly daily discussions between reporters and editors about how to advance recently published stories with fresh perspectives.
Those discussions were a useful exercise because they made us take a step back, think about unresolved issues, and look beyond the news. There were a lot more reporters back then, so if I spent a day following up on one of my stories, there would always be another reporter to cover the breaking news. Over time, we had fewer reporters due to tightening budgets, and the number of those innovative follow-up articles decreased.
Because of AI, our staff is now having those discussions once more, and our readers are receiving a ton of fresh viewpoints.
Reporters and editors discuss potential advancements for any staff-written news or entertainment piece we publish. Perhaps some of the tales from our archives are being used to illustrate a trend or provide historical context. Perhaps government statistics can help us view the original tales from a wider angle. Perhaps it’s just a different perspective that wasn’t given enough attention in the first story.
Reporters provide an AI chatbot with their original stories and the new content, and the chatbot responds with drafts of follow-ups that are produced from the fresh perspectives. Reporters edit drafts to remove ambiguity and unrelated material, check for accuracy, and then publish. To be clear, nothing that AI creates is sent directly to readers; instead, reporters verify all the information, cut out any mistakes or digressions, and make sure the finished product satisfies our requirements.
It is identical to what we used to do, but considerably faster—minutes as opposed to hours or days.
About a month ago, we began posting the follow-up tales, and a lot of them have been rich. Some have received more readings than the stories they are based on.
Think about a few instances.
Building on his reporting and fresh testimony from campaigners, Adam Ferrise used AI to write a follow-up about efforts to lift the courtroom photography ban after reporting on a woman who was imprisoned for filming in federal court.
After Lucas Daprile fed his tale and statewide statistics into AI for fresh perspectives, his story about Trump sending the Guard to Washington turned into a comparison of crime in Ohio’s major cities.
After writing about an 11-day dry period in August, Ryan Cohick utilized artificial intelligence (AI) to combine state, CDC, and EPA data to create a tale about how the return of rain would cause a mosquito outbreak.
After reporting on a proposed roadway that would connect Myrtle Beach and Michigan’s U.P., Sabrina Eaton utilized AI prompts to construct a follow-up that emphasized the plan’s severe financial difficulties.
There are many others. You might argue that the information in the follow-up pieces could have been included in the original news pieces, but we work fast on breaking news. We provide the necessary background information, but we can nearly always discover methods to delve further afterward.
Although we did go further into a few stories during the past ten years, we now do so daily.
Journalists are being empowered by AI, not replaced. With clearer writing, fewer mistakes, and more stories than ever, we are proving every day that local journalism s best days aren t behind us. They’re only getting started.
Chris Quinn’s recent Letters from the Editor
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Lessons that Ohioans in 2025 could learn from a western from 1960: Letter from the Editor
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No time for trolls: How I handle hate and preserve civil discourse: Letter from the Editor
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How Plain Dealer subscribers will soon get a cleaner, more personalized news experience
