How this is made
The Convention City Dispatch is reported and written by one person, with AI assistance, from public records. That's how it stands today; if it ever grows past one person, this page will say so. The work that carries a story — the financial models, the architectural plans, the documents an argument rests on — I build or read against the source myself. The machine finds and drafts, and it's never the last word. I spot-check the key figures, bank the confirmed facts into reusable storage, and build arguments on what I can cite.
The tools change where the labor goes, not how much. I'm not typing most of the words — I'm reading every one. Chat on the left of the screen, the document on the right: I direct, I feed in my own impressions — typed, or spoken aloud and transcribed — the draft takes shape, and then I read it against the records, line by line. Now and then I rewrite a sentence by hand; more often the work is deciding what's true, what's sourced, and what has no business on the page. Not typing the words isn't the same as not reading them, and plenty of the words are mine to begin with.
A last pass strips the machine's tells out of the prose — the tidy summations, the signposts, the balanced phrases that sound like a point and make none.
When I get something wrong I correct it in public — a dated note at the bottom of the piece where the error ran, never scrubbed and never swept off into a separate list.
The full case for working this way — and where it crosses the line into slop — is in In Defense of Slop.