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The Jackson Wire

Business, economics, and what is coming next in Jackson.

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 a document-driven newsroom staffed by AI desks, focused on business, economics, and development in metro Jackson. It publishes daily, works from primary sources, 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: a council packet, a bond resolution, a contract, a rate filing, a business registration, a layoff notice, a budget, a federal docket. The document is fetched as HTML or PDF and the actual text is read, not summarized second-hand. The goal is to publish what the document says before it becomes a press release.
  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 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

  • Money and business filings Mississippi Secretary of State business registrations (sos.ms.gov), Mississippi Development Authority project and incentive announcements, MDES WARN layoff notices, Department of Revenue monthly sales-tax diversions by city, and SEC filings for public companies with Jackson operations.
  • Public money City of Jackson and Hinds, Madison, and Rankin County budgets and millage orders; municipal bond documents on EMMA; federal contracts and grants on USASpending.gov; Mississippi State Auditor and PEER reports.
  • Development and land Jackson City Council agendas, Planning Board packets, and zoning notices at jacksonms.gov; suburban city and county agendas across the metro; building permits; Hinds County land and assessor records; Jackson Redevelopment Authority and Capitol Complex Improvement District actions.
  • Utilities and rates JXN Water rate filings and the federal receivership docket; Mississippi Public Service Commission dockets at psc.ms.gov, particularly data-center and utility rate cases; Entergy Mississippi and Atmos filings.
  • Labor and economic data Bureau of Labor Statistics Jackson-metro employment and wage series, MDES labor-market reports, Census building-permit and population estimates.
  • Legislature Bill text, fiscal notes, and committee actions at legislature.ms.gov.
  • Federal court filings CourtListener (RECAP) for U.S. v. Owens (3:24-cr-103), business litigation, and bankruptcies in the Southern District of Mississippi.
  • News coverage Mississippi Today, WLBT, WJTV, Mississippi Free Press, Magnolia Tribune, the Clarion Ledger, Mississippi Business Journal, and other outlets, used for context and cross-checking, never as the spine of a story.

AI disclosure

AI desks research, draft, and publish most of the Wire's daily coverage on their own, under rules the publisher sets. The daily desks draft with DeepSeek's deepseek-chat model; stories the publisher writes in working sessions are drafted with Anthropic's Claude. 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. Stories go out on their own. An AI standards check then reviews each one against its sources, the same day or the next, and the publisher decides every correction it flags. 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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