Each week on The Newsfeed, host Paris Jackson and a team of veteran journalists dive deep into one topic and provide impactful reporting, interviews and community insights from sources you can trust. Each day this week, this post will be updated with a new story from the team.
Stories on city employees’ AI use in WA leads to impact nationwide
By Paris Jackson
It’s a question almost no one else was asking: how are government employees using AI tools in their work?
But last year, a Cascade PBS Reporter started asking about AI in Washington. His reporting has uncovered novel uses and potential abuses of the technology and has led to other similar news investigations across the country.
Last year, reporter Nate Sanford put in public information requests to many cities in the region for chat logs of employees using ChatGPT.
In August, he published his first stories looking into this topic and found many concerning or questionable uses of artificial intelligence tools.
He also found - in some instances - a lack of clarity from community leaders about how these tools should be used.
He did a follow-up story about an employee allegedly using ChatGPT to help favor a specific vendor for a city contract that led to an investigation in Bellingham.
Sanford is a reporter for Cascade PBS and KNKX, and comes to our newsrooms from the WSU Murrow News Fellowship, which is funded by the state.
“So one kind of question the reporting raised was sort of, some concern about... a lack of transparency and also a lack of really firm guardrails for how this technology should be used,” Sanford said. “Because people are kind of just experimenting with it and using it for all these different things.”
Since his work has been published, he heard from a group in Snohomish County that say it’s inspiring a community-driven process there later this year.
“After my initial reporting came out, the County Council there kind of had this conversation and realized that they need an AI policy, basically. And so right now they're kind of assembling this; It's called a citizens assembly,” Sanford said.
Sanford says thousands of residents in Snohomish County are getting letters to see if they are interested in joining the group of 40 participants.
“Over the course of three weekends this summer, this group of 40 people is going to be basically gathering and working together to research AI issues and study different policies that exist in other places. And then they're going to try to write an AI policy,” Sanford said. “Which is kind of a new interesting thing. It hasn't really been tried before where you... have a citizens gathering like this to, to kind of grapple with these questions about how and if they want their government leaders to be using this new technology.”
Sanford has also heard from other journalists across the country who saw his reporting and decided to do similar stories in their communities.
“So we've heard from a lot of reporters who are doing that, and some of them have encountered challenges trying to get those records,” Sanford said. “We just saw a story in, Chattanooga a few days ago. Some reporters there also obtained lots of chatbot records from their local government. And one interesting thing they found - similar to what we found in Bellingham - is that AI had actually been used to write the AI policy in that city.”
Sanford also recently heard from researchers at Stanford University, who said his reporting inspired a project there.
“This group of researchers are basically starting this new project where they're going to be trying to file hundreds of records (requests), kind of based on my initial reporting, both at the state, federal and even international level,” Sanford said. “And the goal is to kind of assemble this sort of data repository, basically of all these different government chat logs, which is going to be useful for both, like computer researchers, just from the perspective of kind of having this data to analyze and see how people are actually using these tools... The companies themselves don't make this (data) freely available. But being able to break down that data and see what are the most common uses, how are different governments using it?”
Fellowship plans expansion to all 39 WA counties
By Ryan Famuliner, Story Published 03/30/2026
In recent decades, many local newsrooms in Washington state - and nationwide - have shrunk or disappeared. Now, an effort to bring more journalists to Washington state communities has a new goal of placing reporters in all 39 counties over the next 3 years.
In 2023, the Washington Legislature allocated $2.4 million to create full-time journalism positions in newsrooms across the state. The Washington State University Murrow News Fellowship program placed 16 early-career reporters in newsrooms over the last 2 years.
“Local news is really what determines, you know, education for for kids in our community. Tax levies, all sorts of municipal decisions rest on reliable local information,” said Ben Shors, a Washington State University Journalism Professor that serves as the Project Director of the Murrow News Fellowship.
But, in 2025, the state legislature cut the funding in half. To keep the project going, WSU is seeking private funding, and is also planning a new partnership with the nonprofit Report for America.
“When we partner with Report for America, newsrooms get a reporter. But those local newsrooms also get support from RFA's sustainability team, which helps them build fundraising capacity, helps them diversify revenue and develop local donors in a way that smaller media organizations - maybe your weekly newspaper or your digital startup - hasn't had access to or hasn't been able to afford access to,” Shors said.
Cascade PBS is one of the newsrooms that has taken part in the Murrow fellowship program, which brought reporter Nate Sanford to our team. He and the other reporters on the project have published more than 3,000 stories combined so far.
“We're honest that we're not going to solve every challenge facing local journalism. But I think the question is whether communities are going to be better informed, whether local governments are held accountable and whether individuals are engaged in civic life in their communities because of this, and the evidence that we’ve seen so far says yes.” Shors said.
All this week, we’ll be featuring stories from WSU Murrow Fellowship reporters across the state.
Local reporter’s coverage led to Rick Steves’ purchase of hygiene center
By Ryan Famuliner, Story published 03/31/2026
A national PBS host stepped in to save a center serving unhoused people in Lynnwood after a WSU Murrow News Fellowship reporter covered its potential closure.
MyLynnwoodNews published a series of stories last year about the Lynnwood Hygiene Center’s planned closure when the building it was using was slated to be sold.
PBS Host Rick Steves, who lives in Edmonds, says he didn’t even know the center existed until he read one of those articles.
In December, he spent $2 million to help buy the building so the hygiene center could continue to operate.
“I’m excited that we can give our homeless community - our neighbors who happen to be homeless – dignity. A haircut, a shower, a place to wash their clothes - some clothes - a hot lunch,” Steves told those in attendance at the Lynnwood City Council meeting last month.
MyLynnwoodNews reporter Angelica Relente’s position was created through the state-funded WSU Murrow News Fellowship. She says no other news outlets wrote any stories about the center’s potential closure until after Steves got involved.
Relente says her story that got Steves’ attention was the product of months of relationship-building with people at the Jean Kim Foundation, which runs the center.
“I think the way... I covered, reported on everything, might have been different. Might have been looking at it more with an outsider lens, but with having that connection with... the people there and knowing how the hygiene center worked, gave me a better perspective and more understanding on, you know, what would happen if it was to go away, and what will happen now that it’s here to stay and it will continue to serve people who need it the most,” Relente said.
Relente says Steves called her after the second story she wrote about the pending closure was published, to ask her some questions about the situation. She says shortly after, she learned an “anonymous donor” was pledging $2 million to buy the property (and later confirmed it was Steves – though that is what she suspected at the time).
Relente says someone who used the services at the hygiene center recently told her they weren’t sure if they would have survived without the help in the past.
“How can you not cut someone like that a little slack? And realize this world is a tough place. So, you know, it’s complicated. I’m frustrated by the political and economic environment in our country because we’re the richest society in the world. We should be able to handle this without me having to buy this piece of property. But I’m not going to complain - I’m going to buy the property, and hope I get the support of the government, and I can empower the Jean Kim Foundation to do this work for all of us. It’s not a charity - it’s service - these are our neighbors in our community,” Steves said at the Lynnwood City Council meeting.
Steves was at the meeting to also discuss early plans for upgrades to the center, as donations poured in from across the country after the news of his purchase of the center spread.
Investigate West tracks accused teachers skirting accountability
By Ryan Famuliner, Story published 04/01/2026
A recent InvestigateWest story dove into what researchers call “passing the trash,” gaps that allow some teachers to keep sexual allegations out of the public eye. It found numerous examples in just the last year in Washington state.
When a teacher faces misconduct charges in Washington, some districts allow them to quietly resign while the investigation is ongoing.
“If they're, revoking in the middle of an investigation and that stops the investigation, that is obviously a huge, huge issue,” said Moe Clark, a reporter at InvestigateWest through the state-funded WSU Murrow News Fellowship program.
Last year, they published stories about sexual misconduct allegations against two teachers in the Mercer Island School District who resigned before facing any additional discipline. Now, Clark’s kept digging to find out more about the structural reasons this happens. She says researchers call it “passing the trash,” because these systems can enable accused teachers to possibly still find more work.
“The misconduct might not follow them to the next school district. So, you know, if a school district is doing a background check, you know, that's not going to show up,” Clark said.
Even if a teacher is investigated and disciplined, there’s another way to skirt accountability: by voluntarily surrendering their own teaching licenses.
When this happens, the detailed case files won’t show up in Washington’s statewide teacher misconduct database. But, they are available through Freedom of Information Requests.
“We requested the internal database from the state agency that oversees certificates. And, went through the available case files to try to understand more,” Clark said.
Clark says sometimes, the database also labels cases of sexual misconduct with a broader term like “character/fitness.”
So, last month, Investigate West published its own version of the database, more clearly noting where it could be determined that the violation was actually sexual misconduct, instead of a broader term.
Murrow News Fellow covers complexities of rural Eastern Washington
By Ryan Famuliner, story published 04/02/2026
The issues affecting rural Washington are complex, multi-faceted, and often overlooked in mainstream media.
WSU Murrow News Fellowship reporter Monica Carrillo-Casas tells Cascade PBS how she connects with immigrant communities and other underrepresented groups to find the often-neglected stories from a rural perspective.
Carrillo-Casas focuses on covering rural issues in Spokane for The Spokesman-Review and Spokane Public Radio.
Often that means covering stories on immigrant farmworkers in the region, like a recent story about the impact of long COVID on those who continued to work through lockdown during the pandemic.
Carrillo-Casas says on stories like these, and the fact that she is Latina herself helps her sources trust her to tell their stories.
“When it comes to immigration, refugees, immigrants, when I go to an event, they look at me and they say, okay, this is somebody that maybe understands what we're going through, or maybe has a personal story that, I can relate to. I think oftentimes, and I've heard this from other reporters who are trying to cover the speed, is that maybe they get some sort of hesitancy when they're trying to ask them questions about immigration, because, again, a lot of these Latinos don't have reporters going into their communities asking why something matters,”
Carrillo-Casas says building those relationships can lead to better coverage, like when a source she’d known for a year alerted her to a 10-year-old and her father being detained by ICE agents after he was stopped on his way home from dropping her off at school in Spokane.
“And because it got nationwide traction, someone from Texas who once was a Gonzaga student, saw the story and was able to help out and get them released,” Carrillo-Casas said.
