AI & Editorial Standards

Sherman believes our readers deserve to know how their news is made. We use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help us cover our community quickly and at a scale a small newsroom otherwise could not. We also believe AI is a tool, not a journalist. A human is responsible for what we publish. This page explains, plainly, how we use AI and the checks we put around it.

How we use AI

Most articles on Sherman are drafted with the help of AI and then reviewed by our editorial team before publication. Specifically, AI helps us:

• Turn primary-source material — such as official government announcements, published game results and statistics, and weather data from the National Weather Service — into short, readable local stories.
• Summarize and link to reporting from other news outlets, in our own words, with credit and a link back to the original source.
• Draft routine, data-driven updates such as daily weather and local sports recaps.

How we keep it accurate

AI can be wrong, and it can write something that sounds confident but is not true. We treat every AI draft as exactly that — a draft — and we built our process to catch errors before they reach you:

• Fact-checking against the source. Every draft is checked, by automated tools and by people, against the original facts it was built from. Stories that introduce a number, name, claim, or detail not supported by the source are flagged for a person to review.
• An independent review step. A separate AI model, working independently of the one that wrote the draft, reviews each story for accuracy and for copied wording before it can be considered clean.
• Human oversight and editorial responsibility. Our editorial team reviews stories and holds final responsibility for what Sherman publishes. Most categories — including local news, business, and sports — are held as drafts for a person to review before they go live.
• Limited automated publishing. A small number of routine, data-driven updates — currently our daily weather reports — may be published automatically after passing our automated fact-check, and are reviewed by our team shortly after. We do this only where the underlying data is authoritative and the story is purely factual.

On bylines

Some Sherman stories appear under the name of a section reporter. These are consistent newsroom bylines that represent the desk responsible for that beat, not a claim that a specific named individual personally wrote every word. Jake Team LLC and its editorial team are responsible for all content published on Sherman, however it is bylined.

What we do not do

• We do not republish other outlets’ articles. We summarize the facts in our own words and link to the original so you can read it in full.
• We do not use AI to invent quotes, sources, people, events, or statistics. Our stories are built from real, identifiable source material.
• We do not present opinion or speculation as reporting. Our automated stories are written to state only what the source supports.

Corrections

We are a new kind of newsroom and we will make mistakes. When we do, we want to fix them. If you see something that is inaccurate, unclear, or out of date, please tell us and we will review it promptly. Accuracy matters more to us than being first.

Questions or corrections

To reach our editorial team about how a story was produced, or to report an error: