Five out of the 45 finalists in this year’s Pulitzer Prizes for journalism disclosed using AI in the process of researching, reporting, or telling their submissions. Alex Perry reported for us this week on how the folks behind major journalism prizes are thinking about AI in submissions. (The list of finalists isn’t yet public but will be announced with the winners on May 6.) The Pulitzer’s board started thinking about AI submissions last year when AI tools “had an ‘oh no, the devil is coming’ reputation,” Pulitzer Prize administrator Marjorie Miller told Alex.

What changes now that the devil is…here? (I just realized three headlines on our site this week contain the phrase “AI-powered,” whoops, maybe we’ll have to find a new way to describe some of this stuff.) Speaking at SXSW, Zach Seward, the editorial director of AI initiatives for The New York Times, explained how he’s thinking about “the bad and the ugly” and the good, pointing to one recent story about Israeli bombing in Gaza as “a great example of a story that simply could not have otherwise been told without machine learning paired with journalists and experts.” It’s the type of thing we might see more of in next year’s list of Pulitzer finalists.

Zooming back in time for a sec though, we also published a nice story by Corey Hutchins this week about how The National Trust for Local News just bought a “mission-driven” printing press in Colorado. “We recognize that printing presses are no longer the sole means of providing trusted community information,” Colorado Trust program manager Johanna Ulloa Girón told Corey. But “for specific communities [print remains] the only trusted source of hyperlocal news.”