AI is getting a byline. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

The Plain Dealer newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio has been around since the 1800s.

Now it's leaning into a very 21st century tactic, embracing the use of AI in its journalism.

That includes the AI actually writing articles.

The paper's editor, Chris Quinn, says incorporating artificial intelligence is critical to its success.

Willa Remus wrote about this for The Washington Post.

He says, well, lots of publications are experimenting with AI. The plane dealer has taken it further than most.

They're using AI in all kinds of ways to automatically transcribe local government meetings and

pull out insights from those. They're using it to scrape municipal websites to get leads for possible stories.

They've started using AI to turn letters to the editor into articles that summarize the big

takeaways from the letters. But there is one way they're using it that is the most controversial.

And that is what their editor calls the AI rewrite desk. This is where some of their local reporters out in the field gather notes for a story, file them to the rewrite editor who then prompts an AI tool to turn those notes into an article for the newspaper.

I took a look. I understand that like when the AI is part of the reporting process,

it gets a byline called the Advanced Local Express desk. And I looked at some of the stories

it wrote, it does file a lot, which I guess makes sense. There are stories on everything.

Very prolific. It talks about the Cleveland Brown's new head coach. There's a feature about the area's local port authority. What's your take on the journalism that it creates?

The stories that I saw that appear to have been created mostly with AI. So those are the ones that get the little tag that says Advanced Local Express Desk. I should note, though, that their reporters use AI in a lot of

their stories. It's only the ones that are predominantly written by AI that get the tag, which

is interesting. But those stories tend to be pretty basic from what I saw. I mean, they're like,

some of them are, we used to call those like a press release rewrite, right? Like you're a reporter,

you know, the police department puts out a press release rewrite, right? Like you're a reporter, you know,

the police department puts out a press release about a crime that happened, and you basically

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