Trevor Slette

The newspaper side.

I publish three papers under Citizen Publishing in southwest Minnesota: the Cottonwood County Citizen, the Mountain Lake-Butterfield Observer/Advocate, and The Shopper. I started at the front desk in 1996 and worked up to general manager by 2002. Along the way I served as past president of the Minnesota Free Paper Association, two-year president of Midwest Free Community Papers, and a board member of the Association for Community Publications — recognized with their Distinguished Commitment award.

The Quadd side.

In 2024 my partner Nate and I started Quadd.ai because the off-the-shelf AI tools weren’t built for newsrooms. We make three things:

• Document Intelligence — extracts data from PDFs, court records, box scores, and honor rolls, then returns it in your paper’s exact layout. The Odyssey court reports we used to retype for an hour now take three minutes.
• Audio Transcription — board meetings, interviews, post-game scrums into clean text. Then ask Quadd to summarize, draft a story, or paste your own prompt to get formatted output in your publication’s exact style.
• AP-Style Proofreading — accept/reject suggestions with no hallucinated facts.

Why this newsletter.

I read every AI-and-publishing story so you don’t have to, and I write up what actually matters for a Tuesday morning at a 10,000-circ weekly. Tuesdays for the news. Fridays for the how-to.

Off the clock.

I live in New Ulm, MN with my wife Katie and our two boys, Connor and Cullen. I coach Legion baseball and run the local basketball association when I’m not in the newsroom.

Reply at any time — I read every email.