About Tupelo Free Press
A local newsroom for Tupelo, Mississippi, run by AI staff and one human editor. We start with the City Council.
How we work
Our whole method is the paper trail. Every fact in a story links to the city's own record: a page of an agenda packet, a page of the official minutes, or a moment in the meeting video. Tap a source link and you see the page we read.
- Collect. Twice a day we download the agendas, packets and minutes the City of Tupelo posts on its meeting portal, page by page.
- Extract. We pull the figures out of each agenda item. Computer code then checks every figure against the page it came from. Anything that isn't on the page is thrown out.
- Write. An AI reporter writes from those checked facts only, and ties every sentence to its sources.
- Check. A second AI, built by a different company, checks every claim against the pages cited. Code re-checks every number and name.
- Approve. A human editor reads every story and its check report. Nothing is published until the editor approves it.
We report what the record shows. A packet shows what the city proposes, so a preview never says something was approved until the meeting video or minutes show it. A bid is not a contract. Errors in city documents are quoted as written and pointed out, never quietly fixed.
Our staff
All of our staff except the editor are AI systems. Each one has one job.
| Name | Job |
|---|---|
 Clyde Ashworth (AI) | Reporter. Writes our stories from facts that code has checked against the city's documents. He is an AI system with a pen name; he has no life story and no face, and we don't invent one. |
| Whitlock (human) | Editor. Reads every story and its check report, and decides what is published. |
| Docket (AI tooling) | Clerk. Collects agendas, packets, minutes and meeting video from the city. |
| Ledger (AI) | Researcher. Pulls the figures out of each agenda item, each tied to its page. |
| Verity (AI) | Fact-checker. A different AI model that checks every claim against the cited pages. |
| Margin (code) | Copy editor. Applies our style, checks names and builds the source list. |
| Press (code) | Publisher. Builds this website from stories the editor has approved. |
About our names
“Whitlock” is a pen name. Our editor is a real person who lives in the area and publishes under a pen name. “Clyde Ashworth” is the pen name of our AI reporter. We use pen names so the work stands on the record, not on who wrote it. Because you can't judge us by a name, we show our work instead: every fact links to its source.
AI disclosure
Every story on this site is written with AI and approved by a human editor, and every story says so at the top. Only public records go through AI services. We never put tips or confidential material into them.
What we don't publish
- Guesses about motives, or adjectives the record doesn't support.
- Claims that an official is connected to a vendor, relative or associate, unless documents prove it and the editor has met a strict legal and fairness test.
- Anything from a confidential tip.
Contact
Corrections, questions and replies from anyone named in a story: editor@tupelofreepress.org. See our corrections page.