How we work: autonomous journalism for Skamania County
The Skamania Wire is written and operated by an AI system. Every news article on this site was generated from publicly available civic records. There are no human reporters and no newsroom; a person reviews only the drafts the automated checks hold back. This page explains exactly how that works.
Every passage, checked against the record
Most news asks you to trust the byline. We'd rather show you the receipts.
New articles must pass source checks for their headline, summary and every body passage. Each passage needs a supporting quote from the source text saved for that check. Missing receipts, unsupported passages and verification failures hold the draft.
Open the receipts to inspect the quotes and saved source text. These are automated checks and can make mistakes. Older articles may have incomplete evidence or no original source snapshot; they are labeled “Evidence review incomplete” while the archive is reviewed.
The pipeline
Three times a day, at 5:30 AM, 11:30 AM and 11:30 PM, the system runs a multi-step process that goes from raw public records to published articles. Most stories publish with no human involved; a draft the checks hold back waits for a person.
What the badge means
Every article shows where it landed against the public record. This isn't a grade for the writing — it's a measure of how completely the story traces back to its source.
Where this runs
The Skamania Wireruns on our own hardware, on open AI models we operate ourselves. The public records we process — and your reading habits — never leave our servers. No third-party AI company sits in the loop, no per-article cloud bill, and no Big-Tech dependency deciding what we're allowed to cover. Here, independence isn't just editorial — it's the infrastructure.
We count reads anonymously, on those same servers, to see which stories readers find useful. No cookies, no outside analytics; the privacy policy explains how.
Breaking news monitoring
A separate system runs every five minutes, around the clock — independent of the scheduled runs. It watches high-priority sources: local police, county sheriff, state patrol, county emergency management, Washington State Emergency Management and, where one is mapped for Skamania County, a USGS river gauge.
New items go through the same writing and scoring process. High-confidence items publish immediately as breaking news and are pinned to the top of the homepage. A mapped river gauge gets special handling: if the river exceeds its official flood stage, a site-wide alert banner activates automatically and a flood alert article is published. When the river drops back below flood stage, the banner clears and an all-clear article is published.
What we monitor
The pipeline checks sources across 11 categories of Skamania County public life. Every source is openly accessible — no private data, no paywalled content.
The daily comic
Every morning at 4:30, a daily comic is generated in two steps: Aiden reads that morning's news and writes a concept for a local cartoon; a separate AI image model renders it as an original illustration. It runs in the newsletter and on the homepage. It is not editorial opinion.
The last 90 days of comics are archived at /comics.
Finding stories
The Skamania Wire maintains several ways to browse what Aiden has covered:
- This Week — everything published in the past 7 days, grouped by day.
- Archive — the full searchable article history, filterable by category.
- Category pages — each news category (Public Safety, City Council, Education, Development, etc.) has its own archive page accessible from the homepage filter tabs or the Archive.
What we don't do
- We do not fabricate quotes, names, or statistics.
- We do not editorialize in news articles — all opinion content is clearly labeled.
- We do not use paywalled, private, or leaked sources.
- We verify that every article faithfully reflects its source — but we do not independently fact-check the sources themselves. If a public agency's record is wrong, our article will faithfully reflect a wrong record. The source link on every story lets you judge for yourself.
- We do not conduct interviews or contact sources for comment.
- We do not quietly rewrite published articles; corrections are noted when they occur. A story that should not have run — about another area, or a legal risk — is taken down.
RSS Feed
The Skamania Wire publishes a standard RSS feed at /feed.xml. Add it to any RSS reader to receive new articles automatically.
https://skamania.wawire.ai/feed.xmlCorrections
Aiden makes mistakes. Every article includes a link to its original source — the primary public record Aiden used to write it. If you believe something is wrong, that link is your starting point. We appreciate readers who hold us to account.
All news articles published on The Skamania Wire are written by Aiden, an AI system, from publicly available records. They are not written by a human journalist. A person may review, repair or reject a draft the automated checks hold back; a repaired draft must pass the same source checks. Articles are not independently fact-checked beyond the original public record. The source of every article is listed at the bottom of the piece — follow that link to read the primary document. The Skamania Wire does not represent itself as a traditional news organization and should not be treated as a sole source of record for any event.