On Sunday, May 18, 2025, a seasonal edition went out to Chicago Sun-Times newspaper subscribers. The cover showed a happy child submerged in a pool. The title read: “Heat Index: Your Guide to the Best of Summer.”

One reader on Reddit commented, “I was actually excited when I opened Sunday’s paper because I thought it was the round up… with all the summer festivals.”

Reader, it was not.

Instead of the meticulously reported summer entertainment coverage the Sun-Times staff has published for years, these pages were filled with innocuous general content: hammock instructions, summer recipes, smartphone advice … and a list of 15 books to read this summer.

Of those 15 recommended books by 15 authors, 10 titles and descriptions were false, or invented out of whole cloth. Sixteen hours later, the journalist behind the piece ‘fessed up: rather than a reported recommendation list, this one had been generated by an AI agent.

It took a full 24 hours for someone to spot the error and speak up. Another eight hours passed until Chicago Public Media, the parent company of the Sun-Times, issued a correction.

The section was licensed from the third-party content provider King Features, a division of Hearst. The content wasn’t produced by Sun-Times journalists, nor was it reviewed by the newsroom prior to placement in the paper. The Sun-Times and King Features do not allow reporters to use AI to write articles. All the same, it was included under a Sun-Times banner for subscribers to read on Sunday morning.

The articles in these special editions, even if written by humans, are not particularly specific to Chicago. Worse, they were incorrect and seemed as if we were passing off AI-generated content to paying subscribers. This is not what our community — or our staff — wants from the Sun-Times.

At least one other local newspaper ran this section, and others likely would have the following weekend. Even though it wasn’t our actual work, the Sun-Times became the poster child of “What could go wrong with AI?”

But this isn’t just about AI. The summer section was intended to be a supplemental value to our subscribers alongside our own journalism. Instead it detracted and distracted from our work.

We won’t save our business through short-term revenue solutions that alienate and fail to engage our audience. We have to put our resources to overdelivering on quality that only we can bring to our audiences. Our journalists work to help our region have a better neighborhood, community and city — in part because that is the job they signed up for, and in part because it is their neighborhood, too.

Our product is our people; it was a tough day for our people at Chicago Public Media on Tuesday. Our very real human journalists should be celebrating several recent honors — two regional Edward R. Murrow Awards, a Dante Lifetime Achievement Award, a slew of Peter Lisagor Awards for exemplary journalism, as well as NABJ Salute to Excellence Awards.

Instead, those same journalists, and others across our organization, are frustrated, embarrassed and disappointed to suddenly be caught in the crosswinds of the wider conversation of how AI can go wrong, and among other things, threaten the value of local news that they have spent their careers working to fortify.

How did this happen?

Did AI play a part in our national embarrassment? Of course. But AI didn’t submit the stories, or send them out to partners, or put them in print. People did. At every step in the process, people made choices to allow this to happen.

The stories that made it to our print pages started with a freelancer working for King Features. Marco Buscaglia told 404 Media that he is a former full-time journalist who freelances in the evenings. To come up with the material for the summer section, he says he used an AI agent and sent his stories in without checking his work. Human mistakes Nos. 1 and 2.

Buscaglia’s stories arrived at King Features. King Features is conducting its own internal review, so it’s uncertain what broke down internally for it, but it’s likely that the team did not conduct a thorough fact-checking or copy editing process before sending Buscaglia’s work out to partners across the country, including the Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Human mistake No. 3.

King Features is known for providing local newspapers with crossword puzzles and comics, and it is part of Hearst, a large media company that manages dozens of newspapers, a large broadcast news network and hundreds of magazine editions globally. Members of our Sun-Times circulation department, who worked with King Features to select and insert the section, trusted that work licensed from King Features would live up to a level of editorial rigor that matches the standards of Chicago Public Media. Our circulation department did not submit the pages for review to anyone on our editorial team, nor acknowledge in print that the content was created by a third party. Instead, the department packaged it under a Sun-Times banner and sent it to homes across the region. Human mistake No. 4.

The circulation department made these choices because it was trying to help keep our finances as stable as possible. Historically, the Sun-Times printed premium editions about 10 times a year. We sell these editions for an extra amount — $3 apiece — when bundled with the strong journalistic value provided by the newsroom in our full Sunday offering. Previous premium editions have ranged from staff-produced comprehensive voter guides to rich, soulful reporting on this city’s sports landscape to entertainment guides written to help Chicagoans make the most of the packed summer season.

The Sun-Times still produces a print paper, but our editors also serve a growing digital audience with a 24-hour appetite for Chicago news. Producing a premium print edition can take weeks or months of work away from daily responsibilities. To work efficiently with finite resources, the newsroom scaled back to producing fewer premium editions each year. The circulation department wanted to find a creative solution to keep hitting our revenue goals while we transition from print to digital revenue. It found a potential solution with King Features.

The Sun-Times published the first one, “Summer Recipes,” in May 2024. I joined the organization as CEO in September 2024, and was asked if we should continue to publish these special editions. I didn’t deeply investigate the editions and quickly approved the team to continue the practice in place. My reasoning: Let’s not sacrifice any revenue. We published another King Features edition that November on “Holiday Magic,” and last week, the now-infamous “Heat Index.” Human mistake No. 5: my own.

On Sunday morning the section ran in print. On Monday night, a friend sent a friend a photo of the book list in the Sun-Times. That friend passed it on to another friend, Tina TBR, asking if the book recommendations were new releases. She posted the photo to her Instagram Stories, went back to dinner, and went to bed. On Tuesday morning, at 6:04 a.m. CST, one of her followers posted the photo to the social media site Bluesky.

At 8:44 a.m., the chief operating officer at Chicago Public Media emailed me: “Well this is a strange one. Sounds like some of the content on the purchased summer guide from Hearst was potentially made up… I’m not sure how differentiated it was for the reader… Sending to this group for next steps. A correction I assume, and quickly… [we’ve] reached out to Hearst.”

I thought the photograph was an AI-generated joke.

By 10:46 a.m., Jason Koebler of 404 Media tracked down the freelancer responsible for the book list and posted an interview with him. Buscaglia, a former reporter and editor for the Tribune Co., admitted to Koebler that, yes, the article had been created by an AI agent — in fact almost all of the material in the special section had been generated by an AI agent. Other inconsistencies in the section would come to light. The posts detailing these mistakes were shared widely on social media, and many think pieces followed about the future of journalism, decrying the potential bleak morass of AI slop leading to the inevitable failure of local newspapers.

I am sorry for our mistakes that brought us to this point, and I know that this incident will help us be smarter, more thoughtful and more prepared for the very real challenges ahead.

How can the journalism industry learn from this?

It’s easy to say AI is a problem. It’s a lot harder to work, collectively and individually, as humans to catch up and learn and understand how our industry and technology are changing around us. Those of us of a certain age can say from experience: We see this at every stage of the internet’s development; this current evolution is just happening an awful lot faster. If we keep blaming the technology, we’re never going to own the solution.

So, what will we take away from this? First, Chicago Public Media will not back away from experimenting and learning how to properly use AI. We will not be using AI agents to write our stories, but we will work to find ways to use AI technology to help our work and serve our audiences. We’ve started that work recently, in part thanks to a grant from The Lenfest Institute that helps fund an AI fellow to work alongside our journalists on responsible experiments.

We introduced our first draft of an AI policy earlier this year and plan to vet it further with members of various teams forming an AI Oversight Committee, including members from the newsroom, product, legal, insights, sponsorships and enterprise systems.

When we have finalized our AI policy, we’ll post it for our community to weigh in.

The content that ran in this summer guide would have violated the current draft of our AI policy if it had been created in-house without review. Our guidance directs the permitted and prohibited usage of generative AI to create content, the need for fact-checking and editorial review on anything AI-generated, and to always disclose significant use of AI tools.

Going forward, we’ve changed our editorial policy to ensure that any third-party licensed content 1) clearly states where it comes from, 2) is not presented as if it were created by our newsrooms, and 3) is reviewed by our new Standards team with editors from our newsrooms.

It’s fair to say: This experiment to offer nationally syndicated Sunday editorial work to our subscribers did not work. Buscaglia won’t work for King Features again, nor will he work at Chicago Public Media, but I respect that he owned up to his mistake and took the responsibility in public. That kind of accountability is increasingly rare. I believed him when he sent me a sincere apology.

We reviewed the previous two issues from King Features’ editorial department and found no factual discrepancies in the content. We also reviewed the Heat Index edition, and given that Buscaglia admitted he used an AI agent to create it, we removed the digital artifact of the section from our e-Paper edition and replaced it with a note from me. We also informed our subscribers that they would not be charged for that special edition.

We understand King Features is also an organization trying to navigate a new reality, and we plan to discuss lessons with it, as well as other news organizations, to find solutions on navigating this new technological reality. We don’t plan to use other editorial special sections from King Features, but we plan to continue to syndicate comics and puzzles from it, as we have for decades. People do love Garfield.

A few lessons we’ll take from this:

This is how journalism works.

These changes will hopefully help us avoid mistakes like this summer guide in the future. I’m sure other mistakes and errors will occur, and we will have to acknowledge, correct and learn from those as well. That’s a vital and profoundly important part of journalism: We do correct, acknowledge and learn from our errors. Journalism is the first draft of history.

Part of its value is that journalism is a work in progress, as we are all works in progress. So here we are: rewriting this first (or second, or third) draft of AI in journalism.

We must own our humanity.

Our humanity makes our work valuable. We’ve seen a huge decline in people trusting institutions since the 1970s — all levels of government, religious institutions, universities, and, yes, the media. Mix in a lot of talk about “fake news” and a more polarized society? We’re up against a lot. Of course, a section with stories based on AI hallucinations isn’t going to solve this trust problem.

Even though our newsroom has had to shrink in size to adjust to business realities, we’ve made a hard bet that we can (and do!) deliver some of the best journalism for and about Chicago. I’ve been reading the comments — and they are understandably tough on us — but there were also comments like this:

“Please don’t lose sight of the core public good that newspapers perform... The hard news section of the Sun Times is remarkably good. If you read it they’ll tell you every major issue that comes before the city council, who is on which side, and what parties have donated to each of those alders. They’ll tell you what money the Bears and the White Sox are trying to get for new stadiums, and how different politicians are voting. They’ll tell you which bike lanes are getting built and who is for and against them.”

Studies show that local journalism allows communities to be more civically engaged, less polarized, and root out real corruption at the local level. This is all the more urgent as public media faces federal funding cuts.

A week before the book list, the Sun-Times went viral for another reason: our cheeky front page announcing the new pope with a gleeful headline that read “Da Pope!” The pope’s brother was snapped proudly holding the Sun-Times newspaper up. That picture went around the world. We didn’t get that headline from an AI agent. We got it from a bunch of editors making jokes with one another in the newsroom, and then a bunch of editors and reporters arguing about the best way to present the news of the day to our audience. And so we ended up with a decidedly Chicagoan, decidedly human front page that captured the moment of joy and surprise. That’s the kind of work we want to be known for.

The financial pressures on local journalism are real. Help us solve them.

If you were angered about this, and you appreciate valuable local reporting — support your local news outlets. These errors are smaller missteps in the face of much more systemic issues challenging journalism: from a technology industry focused on addicting people to platforms to a presidential administration accusing most media organizations of being fake news.

Finally, please buy books. The book list offered up titles and descriptions that were fake for 10 of the 15 books. But the authors of those 10 books are very real, and are very, very good writers. So let me end where I wished we’d started: These books by these authors do exist, and I highly recommend them:

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