The 10th Street Journal, our experiment with AI journalism, has come to an end. (That sentence was written by a human!)
We had always envisioned it as a short-term trial. Now, after publishing more than 500 articles about everything from road closures to lemur births, we’ve decided to end our 10th Street feature because of a staffing change and a need to focus on the work of our student journalists.
Every weekday, we published short articles that provided valuable information about community events, government meetings and local awards. We also used it for breaking news when there were no student journalists available to cover an important development such as the city manager’s resignation or power outages and closures during a storm.
The 10th Street Journal, named after a non-existent Durham road, gave us valuable experience generating articles with artificial intelligence. But we kept a human in the loop. Each article was reviewed by editors for grammar and accuracy.
We also used AI to create a weekly newsletter that summarized the 10th Street articles. We added a dash of color to each newsletter with a New Yorker-style cover that also was AI generated.
Readers liked 10th Street. Although a few said they were wary of the creep of automation, the 10th Street newsletter had a remarkably high “open rate,” the percentage who clicked to read it. We end the experiment with high hopes for the future of generative AI, which helped us provide lots of coverage we could not otherwise have produced.
We launched 10th Street as an experiment. What did we learn in the process?
We believe generative AI can be a useful tool for strapped newsrooms as long as human editors play a lead role to catch the occasional “hallucinations” and make sure the stories are well written. With those safeguards, the AI can generate valuable coverage that readers would not see otherwise.
Bill Adair, Editor
The 9th Street Journal