Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: Editor At 184-Year-Old Ohio Newspaper Pushes To Let AI Draft News
Articles

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/03/02/0440...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: The Plain
Dealer, Cleveland's largest newspaper, has begun to feature a new byline. On
recent articles about an ice carving festival, a medical research discovery
and a roaming pack of chicken-slaying dogs, a reporter's name is paired with
the words "Advance Local Express Desk." It means: This article was drafted by
artificial intelligence. "This article was produced with assistance from AI
tools and reviewed by Cleveland.com staff," reads a note at the bottom of
each robot-penned piece, differentiating it from those still written
primarily by journalists. The disclosure has done little to stem the backlash
that caromed across the news industry after the paper's editor, Chris Quinn,
published a Feb. 14 column lamenting that a fresh-out-of-college job
applicant withdrew from a reporting fellowship when they found out the
position included no writing -- just filing notes to an AI writing tool.
"Artificial intelligence is not bad for newsrooms. It's the future of them,"
Quinn wrote, adding that "by removing writing from reporters' workloads,
we've effectively freed up an extra workday for them each week." [...] Quinn,
for his part, says his paper's use of AI to find, draft and edit stories is a
success story that others must emulate if they want to survive. "It's a
tool," he said in a phone interview last week. "If AI can do part of our job,
then why not let it -- and have people do the part it can't do?" He added
that the paper's embrace of technology -- including using AI to write stories
summarizing its reporters' podcasts and its readers' letters to the editor --
is already boosting its bottom line, helping it retain staff at a time when
other newspapers are shrinking or even shutting down. Just 130 miles east of
Cleveland, the 240-year-old Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said in January that it
will close its doors this spring. Quinn, who has led the Plain Dealer's
newsroom since 2013, said its newsroom has shrunk from some 400 employees in
the late 1990s to just 71 today. Over the past three years, Quinn has
implemented a suite of AI tools with various purposes: transcribing local
government meetings, scraping municipal websites for story leads, cleaning up
typos in story drafts, suggesting headlines and helping reporters draft
follow-ups to articles they've already written. He said he is particularly
pleased with an AI tool that turns podcasts by the paper's reporters into
stories for the website, which he said generated more than 10 million page
views last year. He has documented those efforts in letters to readers and
sought their feedback. But the paper's latest experiment -- using AI to turn
reporters' notes into full story drafts -- has aroused indignation online and
anxiety within the paper's ranks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

---
VRSS v2.1.180528