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The Jackson Wire

Jackson politics, property, and power.

How the Wire works

Methodology

How The Jackson Wire is reported, written, and verified. The tools, the sources, the disclosures, the limits.

The Jackson Wire is an AI-assisted, document-driven local newsroom. It publishes daily, covers Jackson and Mississippi government and development, and tries to be unambiguous about how each piece is produced. This page is the long version of that promise.

How a Wire article is built

  1. 1. Source first. Each story starts with a primary source the Wire can read directly. The federal docket in the Owens case is mirrored from CourtListener. City Council agendas and Mississippi Public Service Commission filings are fetched as HTML or PDF and the actual text is read, not summarized second-hand.
  2. 2. Cross-check with public news coverage. Where other Mississippi outlets have already reported on the same development, the Wire searches that coverage and quotes from it with in-line attribution by outlet name. A claim that cannot be traced to a document or a published source is cut.
  3. 3. Draft with disclosure.A drafting model (Anthropic's Claude Opus) writes the article under a strict system prompt that bans em-dashes, fabricated quotes, and paraphrasing from memory. Every concrete claim must trace to a tool result the model saw in the same session.
  4. 4. Publish under the editorial responsibility of the publisher.The publisher is accountable for the content. The byline reads “Jackson Wire Staff” rather than a fabricated reporter name. Corrections are handled openly (see below).

Sources the Wire monitors

  • Federal court filings via CourtListener (RECAP). The Wire watches U.S. v. Owens (3:24-cr-103) and adds other federal cases as they arise.
  • City of Jackson Council agendas, Planning Board packets, and zoning notices at jacksonms.gov.
  • Hinds County Board of Supervisors meetings and documents at hindscountyms.com.
  • Mississippi Public Service Commission dockets at psc.ms.gov, particularly utility deregulation and data-center filings.
  • Mississippi Legislature bill text at legislature.ms.gov.
  • Mississippi Secretary of State business and lobbyist filings at sos.ms.gov.
  • News coverage from Mississippi Today, WLBT, WJTV, Mississippi Free Press, Magnolia Tribune, Jackson Jambalaya, The Enterprise Journal, and other outlets, used for context and cross-checking.

AI disclosure

The Wire uses AI tools for research synthesis and drafting on most articles. The drafting models are Anthropic's Claude (Opus and Haiku families). The fact-discipline rules in the model's instructions require every claim to trace to a tool result the model saw in that session: a court filing, a news article, an agenda document. If the model can't verify a claim, it is instructed to leave it out.

AI use does not eliminate error. The editorial responsibility, and the consequences of error, belong to the publisher. The site's corrections log is public.

What the Wire is not

The Wire does not currently conduct shoe-leather reporting: in-person interviews, courtroom observation, attendance at City Council meetings, or original record requests. Coverage is built from public documents and the reporting of other outlets, with attribution. When the Wire writes that a thing happened, it is because a primary source or another publication says so.

The Wire is not a tip line for confidential sources. It is also not, at present, a newsletter with a subscriber agreement, though that is coming.

Corrections

When the Wire gets something wrong, the affected article is updated and a dated correction note is appended. The public list of all corrections is here: /corrections. To request one, email capitolmain42@gmail.com.

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