AI can save local journalism — here’s how

Local journalism can disappear overnight. In fact, it’s happening all around us.

Just this May, two newspapers in North Dakota — the New Town News and the Mountrail County Record — closed. There was no formal announcement, just some legal paperwork and then…silence.

As local news outlets shutter across the country, that silence is growing. According to the Brookings Institution, 65 million Americans now live in “news deserts” — counties where there is no local news coverage at all.

We cannot turn the clock back to a time when newspapers, especially local ones, were an omnipresent source of community and public accountability. We have to look to the future for ways to shore up the local news ecosystem. At this moment, that means harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI).

Why is local news in danger, even when people need and want local journalism? For years, smaller local outlets have faced one big problem: As people have grown used to free services provided by Big Tech, and as advertising has migrated online, local news hasn’t been able to generate the revenue it needs to survive either from ad sales or subscriptions.

Enter AI. Every industry is investigating how machine learning and large language models can enhance their businesses. AI already has a global adoption rate of 35 percent. ChatGPT is one of the most rapidly adopted applications in history, reaching more than 100 million users in just two months. Traditional news outlets were late adopters of web publishing, much to their detriment. We can’t let them fall behind in the even more rapidly accelerating age of AI.

We’re already living in a world where AI has had a hand in much of the text and images we see. The autofill you see when you write a text? That’s AI in action. Online shopping recommendations, web advertising, and Siri and Alexa? Also AI.

And tellingly, some of the world’s leading newsrooms are already tapping into AI’s potential. The Washington Post, for example, uses two proprietary AI tools: ModBot, which moderates the outlet’s comments sections, and Heliograf, which automates certain aspects of data reporting. Both platforms have won awards. Meanwhile, the BBC uses its own AI-powered software Juicer to aggregate news and harvest tags.

So what does AI look like for local journalism? It has the potential to save time and resources for the reporters who staff newsrooms. Shrinking budgets have forced journalists to become jacks-of-all-trades, forced to do more and more with less time and money. That means not just writing stories, but doing all the digital chores that attend a piece online: editable headlines, social copy, file formatting, SEO optimization, optimizing posts for social, and on and on. Imagine a print-era reporter who also had to set the type, stock the ink barrels, sell the advertising and hand out the paper on the street corner. In our own era, each new tweak to the web experience of consumers is a new set of chores for already time-strapped newsrooms.

This is where AI can make a real difference in the local media landscape. It means less time spent doing digital chores, which translates to more time spent actually reporting the news. It’s why outlets such as the Atlanta Voice have started using AI to expedite their publishing processes, so that journalists can spend time out in their communities.

This isn’t good for just local journalists — but for the entire business of local journalism. AI can unleash value that many of these outlets haven’t had the bandwidth to tap into. Most publications have a back-catalog of content that hasn’t been updated for the modern digital landscape. Bigger publications have online archives going back to the 1800s. For smaller publications, equally long backlogs are still locked away in archives.

Large language models can read, analyze and optimize this content so that it can thrive online, where it can act as a resource and a source of advertising dollars.

But machine learning will protect and empower journalists only if newsrooms embrace it soon enough for it to matter.

Moreover, this moment offers the media industry a crucial opportunity to shape how this technology develops. Imagine if print newspapers in the 1990s had been able to shape how web-based distribution would affect their business models, rather than reacting a decade or more later when they were forced to. How many more newsrooms — with the important institutional and local knowledge they preserved — would still be with us today?

We need local news. It has been the bedrock of American journalism and civic culture for our entire history. AI can ensure that it has a future.

Joshua Bandau is CEO of NOTA.