The Cold Fire has burned for nearly five months in Los Angeles County, on federal land managed by the U.S. Forest Service.
A Thursday status update from the Sacramento Bee puts the wildfire's discovery at 11:27 p.m. on June 20. The National Interagency Fire Center lists the cause as undetermined and the containment status as unknown.
The Bee reported a status time of 8:07 a.m., published the item at 8:18 a.m. and updated it at 8:07 a.m. The account was authored by United Robots Sacramento, using AI based on templates created, reviewed and edited by newsroom journalists.
The National Interagency Fire Center’s public Wildland Fire Interagency Geospatial Services system shares incident information among participating applications, with data synchronized in near real time. The system includes fire-perimeter datasets. NIFC’s description of the WFIGS data system explains how the shared records are organized.
The Bee’s use of automated news production has become a point of dispute inside its newsroom. In April, more than 30 of the paper’s 40 journalists were withholding their bylines from stories produced with McClatchy’s AI-powered Content Scaling Agent, a tool designed to increase the volume of content. The controversy adds context to the fire item’s disclosure that it was generated from a template and reviewed by newsroom journalists. CapRadio’s account of the newsroom dispute describes the journalists’ concerns and the company’s stated approach.
