The Future of News?

There’s some mild controversy here in Lexington news circles regarding a scrum between the Kentucky Lantern (for which I have published) and the Lexington Times (for which I have also published, in a technical sense at least). A few weeks back Linda Blackford, formerly editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader (a traditional print newspaper) and currently editor of the Kentucky Lantern (KL), wrote a column about AI and journalism that the Lexington Times (LT) regarded as a mild attack on its existence. Blackford emphasized that the Lantern employed real humans doing real journalism, and that none of its written work was produced by AI… in contrast to some other local publications. The editor of the LT replied with this, acknowledging that the publication makes extensive use of AI as well as taking advantage of free, accessible reporting from other publications (including, as it were, the KL; the LT republishes just about every KL article, which is allowed and encouraged by the KL’s mission statement).

Now, my feet are firmly on the KL side of this not-really-a-dispute, but I think that the editor of the LT makes some points that are worthy of engagement:

Every article on this site is generated from a public-record source — an LFUCG council agenda PDF, a Kentucky State Police press feed, a Granicus meeting transcript, a press release a public-information officer emailed to [email protected] — and is published with a citation, an AI-generation disclosure, and a canonical link to the source document. The pipeline is open-source and the source URLs go on every page. “We” do not invent quotes. We do not fake photos. We do not impersonate reporters. We do not run political ads….

… There is a kind of carpenter who, on principle, refuses to use a circular saw. The hand-cut joints are gorgeous. The rip cuts are dead straight. You can hear yourself think while you work. That carpenter is right that, for a staircase or a built-in or a fine cabinet, the hand saw is the better tool.

And there is a framing crew with circular saws who can put up an entire neighborhood in the time the artisan finishes one staircase. The cuts are not as clean. The crew is louder, and now and then someone loses a finger. But the houses get framed.

Both are doing legitimate work. They are building different things.

Linda Blackford is the cabinetmaker. So are Jamie Lucke on Frankfort, Sarah Ladd on health, Liam Niemeyer on rural Kentucky, McKenna Horsley on policy. The Lantern’s Frankfort beat — slow, sourced, judgment-driven, written by people who have spent careers learning where the bodies are buried in Kentucky government — is exactly the work that AI cannot do. Every Kentucky news consumer should be reading them. Honestly, if they billed us a republication fee we would pay it.

We are the framing crew. We are one person in Cumberland Hill and a Python script, covering a 320,000-person city that has lost most of its local journalism in the last 15 years. The Herald-Leader’s print newsroom is a fraction of what it was. The neighborhood weeklies are gone. WKYT covers what its broadcast clock allows. Most LFUCG council meetings are attended in person by zero credentialed reporters and one civic-minded blogger livestreaming on YouTube — that’s our other project, LexBot.

The actual choice in Lexington civic coverage in 2026 is not “AI summary or staff reporter.” It is “AI summary or nothing.” Given that, we chose AI summary — with disclosure, with citations, with an editor reviewing the pipeline daily, and with the published email address of a human (me) who responds to corrections at [email protected].

I’ll let y’all do some engaging with this argument in comments. My initial sense is that while I overwhelming prefer the model that the KL is pursuing (and that many organizations are pursuing around the country in order to replace the collapsing local newspaper market), I’m not convinced that the Lexington Times should not exist (to be clear this is not the argument that Linda Blackford is making, either). The LT serves the community in a way that is economical, and it probably would not exist without the assistance of AI tools. Of course, it also sometimes does this. I’m also curious how regularly this situation is replicated in news markets across the country… if you know of any please detail in comments.