Doomsday Alert: One prominent newspaper chain is using AI to create different versions of the same story

The story you read in one city may be slanted for a different audience in another city

When I started pounding a manual typewriter for a small local daily newspaper in 1970, I couldn’t have imagined the headline I came across in The New York Times just the other day.

“Reporters at McClatchy Withhold Bylines in Dispute over AI Content,” it said as chills ran up and down my scoliosis.

Locally, of course, McClatchy means The Sacramento Bee, an esteemed, multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning publication that has been around nearly as long as California has been a state.

But forget the Pulitzers, impressive as they may be. The Bee has always set high ethical standards for all its editors and reporters, be they award-winners or not.

Unfortunately, like nearly every other newspaper in the country, The Bee’s circulation is a mere fraction of its former self, and it now barely has enough folks in the newsroom to field a company slow-pitch softball team.

The Bee was founded by Sacramento’s McClatchy family but was sold not long ago to the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management, which retained the McClatchy name. The chain has 30 papers in 14 states.