Local doesn’t scale: How community publishers can survive and thrive in the AI era

Folks who work at finding solutions to the local news crisis are understandably frustrated at what a difficult, frustrating slog it can be. Earlier this week, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, the former executive director of the National Trust for Local News, gave Richard J. Tofel a preview of a report she’s written for Press Forward and said, “I think the challenges now are so systemic that the only way to do responsible, impactful funding going forward is to look at system solutions rather than newsroom-based ones.”

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I’m looking forward to reading Hansen Shapiro’s report. (She’s featured in our book, “What Works in Community News,” and has been on our podcast.) And yet there really is no substitute for solving this problem one community at a time. For all the talk you hear about scale, that’s really not the way to go unless you’re talking about obvious things like finding a common tech platform so that every local news publisher doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel — or, in this case, the content management system. In the early days of the hyperlocal news movement, a group of publishers got together and formed an organization called Authentically Local. Its spot-on message: “Local Doesn’t Scale.”

Authentically Local is no longer around, but other organizations — especially LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers — have risen up to take its place. LION current lists 445 members, many of them tiny hyperlocals comprising one, two or three people. And yes, LION provides its members with ideas for common solutions, but fundamentally its members are independent,  locally based entrepreneurs, for-profit and nonprofit, who are engaged in the hard but rewarding job of bringing news and information to their communities.

What brings all of this to mind is the growing perception that AI can help solve the local news gap. To some extent, it can if used responsibly and ethically. As I wrote recently, I think Chris Quinn is taking it too far at Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. By turning over the task of actually writing stories to AI, he’s eliminating the vitally important work of having the journalists who reported those stories sift through the nuances and emphasis points that readers need. But at least he says he’s enforcing some ethical guidelines, the most important of which is human review before publication.

I wonder, though, if that’s going to be the case at Patch. Liz Skalka reports for the Columbia Journalism Review that the nationwide network of local news sites is embracing AI in a big way, using AI to produce newsletters that “rely heavily on aggregation, automated event calendars, and posts from Nextdoor.” She quotes Patch chief executive Warren St. John as saying “This is a utility. This is not the high church of journalism. This is about creating a foothold in a relationship and meeting a need.” I find it a little difficult to see exactly what need is being met. I mean, Nextdoor posts?

Patch has been through several iterations and ownership changes over the years. At one time, maybe 12 to 15 years ago, Patch had one actual journalist in each community it covered, and they would go out and cover stories; I recall encountering a Patch editor who was working out of a Borders bookstore. I still see some of that in our local Patch, although each site now covers multiple communities. And in New Hampshire, Tony Schinella continues to provide award-winning coverage for Patch. But I have to wonder how long that will continue with Patch’s new AI overlords taking charge. Maybe they’ll do both. I hope so.

A happier story is told by Alexandra Bruell in The Wall Street Journal. Bruell reports on news organizations that are using AI to extend the reach of their actual journalists. Among them: The Philadelphia Inquirer, a for-profit regional daily owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute. She writes:

Reporters are using artificial-intelligence tools to scan community meetings for topics that may prompt news, such as a zoning issue related to an ICE detention facility and a proposal for a new data center. The effort is partly funded by a partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft and the nonprofit Lenfest Institute, which owns the Inquirer.

Using AI to ferret out stories that reporters can then follow up on is exactly the sort of task that is best handled by robots. Bruell adds that AI “promises a way to monitor police scanners and town meetings — the time-consuming bread and butter of much local journalism — more efficiently, and even opens the door to expanding coverage.” Indeed, that’s exactly what’s happening at the Midcoast Villager in Camden, Maine, where the paper’s small staff is using AI to summarize governmental meetings in the 43 towns it covers to see what might be worth the intervention of a human journalist.

The need for local solutions to local problems is greater than ever because of another AI phenomenon: its incorporation into Google search. Google now produces AI-generated summaries in response to queries, and even though those results include links, most users don’t bother to click. Never mind that the answers may be flat-out wrong.

Anna Nicolaou of the Financial Times reported last week that magazine publisher Condé Nast has been hit with such a drop in incoming traffic that Google will soon be inconsequential to its magazines, which include titles such as The New Yorker and Vogue. How bad is it? Over the past year, chief executive Roger Lynch said, Google has declined from providing a majority of incoming traffic to just 25%. Yet Condé Nast’s revenues actually grew in 2025, Lynch said, mainly because of the company’s success in selling digital subscriptions.

Which brings me back to where I started. Condé Nast may not be engaged in the local news business, but it’s succeeding by building direct relationship with its audiences. At the local level, publishers need to move beyond tech platforms, which were never their friends, and serve their communities. Every farmer’s market is an opportunity to sign people up for their newsletters. For-profits need to get readers to subscribe — and give them a reason to do so. Nonprofits need to drive voluntary membership fees. Events bring people together and raise visibility.

Publishers can learn from each other and develop best practices, but ultimately they need to apply these lessons in a way that makes sense for their own individual projects.

Local doesn’t scale.