We hit the 5-year anniversary this month of Today in Ohio as a daily podcast discussion of the news in Ohio and Northeast Ohio, and to celebrate, we’re giving cleveland.com readers their own text-based version.

We started the podcast as a weekly discussion in 2019, calling it This Week in the CLE. When the pandemic hit and many people sealed themselves up at home, we went five days a week. We thought a daily discussion might give the isolated masses a closer connection to the news – and to us. 

The name didn’t work for a daily podcast, so we changed it to Today in Ohio.

The podcast panel has evolved but has been steady for several years, with me, content director Laura Johnston, public interest and advocacy editor Leila Atassi and Editorial Board member Lisa Garvin. Courtney Astolfi, another editor in our newsroom, subs for Leila on Wednesdays.

We are pleasantly surprised – and grateful -- to regularly hear from people about how much they like the podcast, but we also hear from people who don’t have time to listen and feel they miss out on key perspective. They do. The podcast is a unique platform for us, where we talk about news while also calling balls and strikes. We ask the unanswered questions, talk about potential newsmaker motives  and call out the utter nonsense coming from politicians. You won’t find anything like it elsewhere.  

We publish an automatically generated transcript, which is long, often error-filled and confusing to follow, but we have been unable to convert the conversations into something useful for our other platforms.

Until now.

We’ve experimented since January with artificial intelligence. The goal is for AI engines to help write stories about our most provocative conversations.  For weeks, we repeatedly hit a wall. The AI engines kept making the stories about the topics of our conversations rather than the conversations. Of course, we already published stories about the topics, which is why we were discussing them on the podcast in the first place.

David Cohn is the AI guru for Advance Local, our parent company, and this week, he figured out a solution. On Tuesday, when we asked our AI to convert conversations into stories, it gave us pieces we could work with. We edited them, and then we published them. We published three on Tuesday, three more on Wednesday and more on ensuing days.

Human hands are all over these stories – mostly mine. We don’t publish the original product that comes from the AI, but we use it as our framework. 

I’ve mentioned often that our resources are limited. We don’t have people in the newsroom with free time to write stories about podcast conversations, and even if we did, that would waste their time. We want reporters out finding new stories, not recycling old ones. Our only way forward here is with some automation, and this week, thanks to David, we got it.

I’ve already received positive feedback from some readers who are glad to engage with the podcast, even if they don’t have time to listen. I’ve heard from a couple of people with questions about why we are doing this, which is one reason for this column.

Ou next step will be to use the tool to create stories about our insight-filled sports podcast discussions. Look for those soon. And please know that this is a continuing experiment. We will continuously refine it.

Separately, I mentioned that Leila is one of the podcast regulars, and you might have noticed her increasing presence on cleveland.com and in The Plain Dealer. She has added a weekly column to her many duties.

Leila was a metro columnist when I persuaded her to become an editor. Time is running short for the leaders of my generation of journalists, and the future of our vital work depends on the best and brightest of the next generation becoming leaders. You’ve seen that with Laura, our content director, and for the past few years, you’ve seen it with Leila. She was the editor who oversaw our groundbreaking series, Cleveland’s Promise about the city schools and Delinquent, which examined Cuyahoga County’s justice system.

Leila is the best writer I’ve worked with in 45 years, though, and she misses it. I told her from the start that she was welcome to write a column whenever she wished, but she spent the past few years wholly focused on developing her leadership skills. Only now does she feel she can work column writing into her schedule. I’m so glad that she can.

What makes her column unusual, other than how good it is, is where we place it in The Plain Dealer. Every Monday, it’s on page 1. Normally, columns run in our opinion pages.

My thinking here is that our Monday front page has been catch as catch can. If we are overloaded with great stories as a week ends, we have enough to make for a powerful Monday front page. During vacation season or slow news periods, though, the stories on Monday can be kind of lame.

Anchoring the Monday front page with Leila, and featuring her on our website, starts the week with substance. Her aim: “This weekly column aims to set the tone for public discourse at the start of each week, offering thoughtful commentary on the issues shaping our community. It’s designed to challenge assumptions, spark conversations and provide clarity in an often noisy news cycle.”

I love the idea of kicking off the week by being provocative. In her first month, she’s written about Ohio lawmakers violating the deal with voters over marijuana taxes, Cleveland City Council deplorable slush funds and the toxic masculinity pushed by JD Vance. Great stuff, all of it.

So, keep looking for her pieces each Monday. They’ll shake you free of the weekend cobwebs and get your brain working. 

I’m at cquinn@cleveland.com

Thanks for reading.