Spend enough time reading about media and different narratives start to emerge. On one hand are the big media brands, who are upping their subscription numbers and buying up everyone’s favourite five-letter addiction. On the other hand, however, is coverage of local news, which, with few exceptions, is traditionally dismal in tone.
As someone who has spent time working in local news, I know that the worries about the business model are real. However, the destinies of the biggest outlets and their smaller local brethren may not be as wide apart as sombre, nostalgic media columnists may have had you believe. There are even some signs of hope as local news sites have moved towards support from readers rather than advertisers.
Part of the change in the media industry has also been an adoption of new technologies like AI, and these are increasingly not just the focus of the biggest outlets. Overtone was recently awarded a place in NYC Media Lab’s AI & Local News Challenge alongside other participants such as Gannett’s Localizer team and researchers at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics. This week I spoke with Matt MacVey, who leads up the program, about what AI can do for local news.
“I don’t have illusions that there’s going to be a panacea. People talk about ‘there’s no silver bullet for journalism’ a lot, which I definitely think is true. But this stuff is changing so fast that if local news organizations get behind, you’ll get kind of steamrolled by some of these changes,” he said.
MacVey’s program is working with others such as the Associated Press and the Partnership on AI to understand how AI can be useful to local newsrooms in the US and beyond. This means everything from voice transcription apps to automated story writing to, well, Overtone data. While our data can be used everywhere, it can be particularly useful to local news as networks of outlets share their best content with each other, local journalists monitor certain topics like the mention of their city and the outlets understand better what type of coverage their readers want to read.
“As far as the consumer is concerned, you’ll be able to kind of use these AI tools to better understand your audience needs,” MacVey said.
To us, going after a “local” audience prompts greater discussions of what “local” means and what sort of scale you look at to decide that meaning. You can look at cities or regions, but zoom into specific communities within a space as small as a few blocks of a neighborhood or expand “local” more broadly to entire countries (how often have you seen the phrase “local media reported” for countries as large as China or India). It’s a question whose borders can bleed into ideas about language and personalization.
To me personaly, the core, inescapable notion of “local” is that of serving a community, listening to, enunciating, and responding to its needs rather than serving your own pre-established worldview, politics or ideological bent.
It’s a little hard to illustrate, though my mind wanders back to when I was on the night shift at a local paper in New York. I would get off at 5 a.m., exhausted, and drag my feet to the subway to ride home with the early-rising construction workers, nurses and shop owners just heading to work. Sometimes I would see one engrossed in a copy of the newspaper that I had seen editors scramble to meet deadline on several hours earlier. I knew that they, the readers of all different shapes and sizes and the community they formed, were the most important part of local news.
How then does local news, with its focus on community, best use technology, where attempts to bring people together algorithmically can lead to polarization, isolation and even radicalization? Maybe part of the way we think about it shouldn’t be having local newsrooms “catch up” to the bright shiny AI future, but put the technological power that has been used by platforms and big players in the hands of smaller outlets with different missions.
So what does it look like when local news has made the jump from surviving to thriving, likely with the help of AI?
“It’s kind of funny because I feel it sounds very high tech anytime you’re talking about AI, especially in the abstract,” MacVey said.
“It’s not that I’m imagining a super shiny robotic newsroom or something like that. I’m more just imagining a lot of good news being put out there.”
