Intelligence, AI, web systems, digital strategy, and occasional opinions on how things actually work.
I ran the websites for Northeast Tennessee's newspapers from 2012 to 2025. Everyone writes about what happened to local news in the newsroom. This is what it looked like from the server side.
Two cities, two states, one main street. A sourced OSINT audit of what the internet and AI get wrong about Bristol, TN and VA, and what is genuinely good.
The one the rankings keep crowning the best of the Tri-Cities. I checked whether the local favorite holds up. The part that broke was not the part anyone expects.
I pointed my own tradecraft at my own city, asked five AI systems the same question, then checked every number against a primary source. The internet's Kingsport is confident, tidy, and wrong in the places that matter.
AI prompts are now discoverable evidence. An expert was ordered to produce hers, and a CEO's ChatGPT logs were quoted in court. What it means for your work.
AI made content nearly free, so the web filled up and trust got scarce. Why specific, human detail is now the one thing that earns trust back.
I use AI every day for work. The strangest thing it has done is make me clearer about what my own judgment actually is.
Most AI content makes it sound like the future arrives in one perfect prompt. My actual use of AI is a lot less glamorous: messy filings, broken code, bad OCR, skeptical clients, ugly spreadsheets, and a lot of human verification.
A retired detective and published author sat through a class and a half before he told me he'd written AI off completely. Then he told me what changed his mind.
The advice is always to specialize. Pick a lane. Become the expert. There are good reasons for that. Depth is real, and you can't fake it.
When someone calls and says they need a redesign, I ask what's wrong with the current site. About eight times out of ten, the answer has nothing to do with design.
A screenshot proves one thing: that someone, somewhere, at some point, made an image that looked like that. It does not prove the post was real. It does not prove the account belongs to who the file name says it does
The most useful way to think about AI right now is to compare it to electricity. Electricity was a marvel when it arrived. People paid to watch lights turn on. Within a generation, nobody noticed it anymore; they just flipped a switch. The marvel had become infrastructure.
Anyone can search. Type a name into Google, hit enter, scroll. That's not investigation, that's reading. Hypothesis. A searcher types what they hope to find. An investigator works on a question and lets the evidence answer.