Host Jason Michael Perry sits down with Greg Morton, data editor at The Baltimore Banner, to talk about what AI is actually doing inside a newsroom — and why admitting you used it can cost you a reader.

Long before anybody called it AI, machines were writing sports recaps, earnings reports, and election results. What changed isn't that machines write, it's that now they can write about anything and you can't tell. Greg and Jason get into the Banner's published AI rules and what they mean on deadline, what happens to what people believe when the good reporting is behind a wall and the junk is wide open, and how newsrooms are using these tools to get through document dumps no human could read in a lifetime. Greg was part of the team named a 2026 Pulitzer finalist for an investigation that tracked every city bus in Baltimore, every five seconds, for four months, to show why thousands of kids can't get to school on time.

Podcast Notes & Links

• The Baltimore Banner
• Greg Morton's work – The Baltimore Banner
• Missing the Bus: the Banner's school transit investigation
• 2026 Pulitzer Prize finalist citation, Local Reporting
• Ars Technica retracts an article containing AI-fabricated quotes – Nieman Lab
• How newsrooms used AI to work through the Epstein files – Reuters Institute
• Newswriter guilds on The Baltimore Sun's AI-written analyses – WYPR Midday
• BannerX 2026 – September 30 in Columbia, Maryland

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Credits

Thanks to the team at WYPR, our producer Sam Bermas-Dawes, and Myrna Martinez, Head of Operations and Marketing at PerryLabs.