# Editor's Notebook: Hand saws, circular saws, and the Lantern **Published:** 2026-05-16T16:00:00.000Z **Source:** [The Lexington Times](https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/article/editor-s-notebook-hand-saws-circular-saws-and-the-lantern) **AI-generated:** yes (claude-opus-4-7) **Canonical:** https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/article/editor-s-notebook-hand-saws-circular-saws-and-the-lantern By Paul Oliva, Web Editor · The Lexington Times · May 16, 2026 _The Editor's Notebook is an occasional column from The Lexington Times about local coverage choices — ours, and other newsrooms'. This one is a reply to a column the Kentucky Lantern's new editor-in-chief, Linda Blackford, published yesterday._ ![Wide split-composition photograph of a Kentucky woodworking shop in golden-hour light. Left half: a hand-cut dovetail joint on a walnut cabinet door beside a vintage hand saw and a roll of brass-fitted chisels. Right half: an open laptop showing colorful Python code, a yellow Stanley FatMax circular saw resting on a fresh-cut 2x4 with drifting sawdust, and a clipboard labeled ](/media/off-beat/editors-notebook/blackford-reply-cover.jpg) (Two valid kinds of work, side by side. (Image generated by Google Gemini 2.5 Flash Image at the direction of The Lexington Times.)) On Thursday, [Linda Blackford](https://kentuckylantern.com/staff/linda-blackford/) — veteran journalist, three decades at the Lexington Herald-Leader, now editor-in-chief of the Kentucky Lantern — published an [Editor's Notebook column on AI in journalism](https://kentuckylantern.com/2026/05/15/editors-notebook-our-work-is-produced-by-real-journalists-not-ai-bots/). It is a thoughtful piece. It is also, by my reading, partly about us. “We're” the unnamed “organization” Blackford references — the one that had started taking [Lantern] content and rewriting it with AI and that, after she asked, went back to using our complete stories and columns. That happened in mid-April. The “organization” did not just stop. “We” rebuilt the integration around States Newsroom's own /repub/ flow: full byline preserved, canonical URL pointing back to kentuckylantern.com, [CC BY-NC-ND attribution honored](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). “We” are, today, exactly the syndication partner States Newsroom designed that flow for. So in the narrow sense: the dispute behind her column is already resolved. Good. But the column raises a broader question, and that one is worth a longer answer. ## The two AIs in her column Blackford's piece moves fluidly between two very different uses of AI, and the slippage is what produces the alarm. The first is what I'll call **fabrication AI**: the [Massie throuple ad](https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article315747513.html) produced by a PAC to deceive voters. The Kentucky Castle “Game of Thrones” hoax. Synthetic images, manufactured quotes, claims attached to people who never made them. Blackford is right to be alarmed. Every newsroom should be. The second is what States Newsroom's own policy correctly endorses, in the same column: AI has huge potential in wrangling complex data sets, finding patterns, and uncovering corruption. “We” do the second kind. “We” do not do the first kind. 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 [editor@lexingtonky.news](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news) — 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. ## The Versailles test Worth flagging one wrinkle Blackford may not have spotted: the viral Kentucky Castle video that drew her two hundred commenters arguing over whether Game of Thrones was filmed there — and, as a sidebar, how to pronounce _Versailles_ — was itself an AI production, made by [Kentucky for Kentucky](https://www.kyforky.com), the Lex-based culture shop with a long history of taking the state's bona fides extremely seriously. To get the Kentucky right, the team behind it almost certainly had to lean on the prompt: tell the model to say **“Vurr-Sales,”** and not the French way, because the AI's first instinct — like a tourist's — is to go Continental. That is editing. That is craft. The fact that the AI in that video sounded like Kentucky was not luck. It was a Kentuckian, sitting at a keyboard, telling an LLM how Kentuckians actually talk. That is sort of the whole job. ## The carpenter and the framing crew 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](https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/about/paul-oliva) 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](https://www.youtube.com/@TheLexingtonTimes/live). 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 editor@lexingtonky.news](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news). ## What the framing crew has built Some examples of the kind of civic work this lets one person produce. None of it, to my knowledge, exists anywhere else for Lexington: - The Lexington Contributors Dashboard — every itemized contribution to every LFUCG candidate and PAC this cycle, filterable by candidate, donor, employer, ZIP, occupation, and contribution date. It is the same Kentucky Registry of Election Finance data the Herald-Leader's reporters can pull on deadline; we just put it on the open web for any citizen who wants to ask the same questions. - The LFUCG Meetings Archive — every Urban County Council and committee meeting since the start of the Granicus archive, transcribed by Whisper, summarized by Claude Sonnet, indexed for both keyword and semantic search, and deep-linked back to the canonical Granicus video at the exact timestamp. You can ask the archive a natural-language question — what did Councilmember James Brown say about the urban service boundary? — and get a cited answer in seconds. Nobody else has indexed this material. - The Lexington Precinct Data Map — all 286 Fayette precincts on a single map, showing how each one voted in the 2024 presidential election alongside other precinct-level figures. Click a precinct to see the local vote totals and how your block voted compared to the city as a whole. - The Snow Plow GPS Map — every LFUCG snow plow route during the Jan 21 – Feb 13, 2026 storm system, rendered from the GPS feed the city publishes but does not, itself, plot on a map. This is what the framing crew does. It does not replace the cabinetmaker. It builds the kind of structural reference material that legacy newsrooms used to put on staff for and no longer can. ## What accountability looks like at this end of the workshop Earlier this month, a reader emailed me about an article we'd published from a May LFUCG work-session agenda. The original headline read **“Council OKs $375K transportation, broadband deals.”** A work session does not, in practice, OK anything — final votes happen Thursday — and the agenda alone cannot verify a vote that has not occurred yet. The reader was right. I deleted the article within ten minutes of his email, pushed a fix to the rewriter's framing rules so it would no longer infer past-tense votes from forward-looking agendas, redeployed the service, and reran the pipeline. The corrected version, headlined [“Lexington council to consider Rides United, broadband deals,”](https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/article/lexington-council-to-consider-rides-united-broadband-deals) is now the canonical piece. The bad one is gone. That is what accountability looks like at a one-person AI-augmented outlet. It is not the same accountability the Lantern's reporters answer to — it is, in some specific ways, faster and more transparent. In some other specific ways, it is no substitute for thirty years of beat reporting. ## Where I think we land If Linda's column is read as we don't publish bot copy or deepfakes, I agree with every word. If it is read as AI-generated coverage is inherently illegitimate journalism, I'd respectfully say the column itself disproves the claim, by endorsing the same data-wrangling use we make. We just use it for more than spreadsheets — we use it to translate the linguistic equivalent of spreadsheets (agenda PDFs, transcripts, press releases) into prose a citizen can read on a phone. The Pulitzers will not be coming to feeds.lexingtonky.news any time soon. We are not auditioning for that. We are doing the unglamorous middle-distance work of: agenda came out; here is what is on it; here is the source link; here is the disclosure that an LLM wrote the paragraph; the publisher is one guy with a laptop in Cumberland Hill. We respect the cabinetmakers. We are not coming for their jobs. But the houses still need to be framed. And in Lexington in 2026, the framing crew is us. Hi Linda. Welcome to the editor-in-chief job; you have made the Lantern stronger already. The republish flow is working beautifully on our end. Thanks for the column — you were right to write it, and I am glad we both got to. _Got a tip about local coverage choices — ours, or anyone else's? [editor@lexingtonky.news](mailto:editor@lexingtonky.news)._ ## Sources - [Linda Blackford — Editor's Notebook: Our work is produced by real journalists, not AI bots (Kentucky Lantern, May 15, 2026)](https://kentuckylantern.com/2026/05/15/editors-notebook-our-work-is-produced-by-real-journalists-not-ai-bots/) - [Kentucky Lantern — Linda Blackford staff bio](https://kentuckylantern.com/staff/linda-blackford/) - [Kentucky Herald-Leader — AI-generated political ad targeting Rep. Thomas Massie](https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article315747513.html) - [Kentucky for Kentucky](https://www.kyforky.com) - [Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) - [The Lexington Times — About Paul Oliva](https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/about/paul-oliva) - [LexBot 24/7 Local News Livestream (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/@TheLexingtonTimes/live) - [Lexington Contributors Dashboard](https://app.lexingtonky.news/) - [LFUCG Meetings Archive](https://meetings.lexingtonky.news/) - [Lexington Precinct Data Map — 2024 presidential vote by precinct](https://precincts.lexingtonky.news/) - [Lexington Snow Plow GPS Tracker (Jan 21 – Feb 13, 2026)](https://plowmap.lexingtonky.news/) - [The Lexington Times — Lexington council to consider Rides United, broadband deals (the corrected agenda article)](https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/article/lexington-council-to-consider-rides-united-broadband-deals) --- This editor's notebook column was drafted with AI assistance (claude-opus-4-7) at the direction of Lexington Times web editor Paul Oliva, who reviewed and finalized the published text. The featured image was generated by Google Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (Nano Banana) from a prompt written for this column. The column it replies to is Linda Blackford's May 15, 2026 Editor's Notebook at kentuckylantern.com; this reply was not coordinated with the Lantern.