Adam Trumble
I spent most of my waking hours between 1998 and 2005 in dimly lit rooms watching article after article I authored being attacked by a red ink pen.
While at the bars in college, I often found myself away from my friends and peers — I was at the “adult” table talking shop with professors and news hounds with decades of experience.
I wasn’t sucking up for better grades; I was just trying to find my writing voice. I was trying to perfect my craft — trying to perfect my art.
Throughout the drafts of these stories, it was beat into my head over and over: “Write short.”
“One thought per paragraph.”
“Find your voice.”
It is the type of training every journalist at the Nevada Appeal, The Record-Courier and Lahontan Valley News has experienced.
The words we type are our own. The typos we make are our own. The typos we make that the editing staff doesn’t catch are our own.
That’s why I can sit here and say emphatically: The above listed news organizations will NOT be using generative AI — artificial intelligence — in our pages (both digital and in print).
Now I can’t say we won’t be using AI in the newsrooms. After all, we do use spell-checkers. We also use Google to make sure names are spelled correctly, addresses are correct and phone numbers are accurate — all of that falls under the umbrella of AI.
What we won’t be doing is having a computer write a story, news article, or creating verbiage for us. We will continue to do our reporting by picking up the phone and calling sources, and attending meetings and events.
The entire content-creating team agrees that generative AI is an insult to you, the readers.
The stories of the issues with generative AI are all over the internet: computers writing stories under fake people’s names (Sports Illustrated); AI articles riddled with factual errors (CNET); and more.
There’s also the issue that the courts and Congress have started to explore: copyright law when it pertains to generative AI. There’s a lot of questions that remain in that sphere that need to be clarified for publishers before even thinking about the benefits of generative AI.
Generative AI writes some pretty solid click-bait headlines; they are easy to spot. I have long told the team of journalists here that writing sensationalized, click-bait headlines isn’t in our DNA. We strive to write accurate, fact-based headlines and will continue to do so. Accuracy goes back to credibility and credibility is everything to us.
But we take generative AI personally. A computer can’t cover Western Nevada. A computer can’t accurately report a planning commission meeting. We are a part of the community. We are a small business; we eat at local establishments; we shop in our communities; we are representative of the community.
We talk to the people who own these establishments. We don’t talk to robots — except for those pesky self-checkout machines. It all goes back to credibility.
We understand that there’s some benefits to generative AI that we will (happily) bypass. Computers are cheaper than people. But employing community members is an upside that we are happy to provide. When you come to our office or call about circulation, you are going to reach a person. Of course, we have the same struggles as all small businesses — staffing and illnesses, in particular — and it does sometimes take a few days for us to catch up.
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One of our challenges with saying we won’t be using generative AI is that we accept a lot of information from the public. We pride ourselves on devoting space to service clubs and organizations who are hosting events and needing to promote them to the community. We will continue to accept information from outside sources — it could be written by generative AI, but everything that comes to us gets touched by multiple sets of human fingers before making it to our pages.
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We will be making some adjustments to our websites in the upcoming weeks to make sure you realize we are humans putting fingers to keyboards to fill the pages of this paper.
We are working on our full-time staff pages to give you information about us and our duties. You will be able to see our recent work, as well. We will update when that part of site is active.
Adam Trumble is the editor of the Nevada Appeal and the operations director for the Nevada News Group (Nevada Appeal, The Record-Courier, Lahontan Valley News & Northern Nevada Business Weekly). Reach him at atrumble@nevadaappeal.com.