One of the great things about doing a podcast called “This Week in Local” is the flexibility of the term “local”.
Local is inclusive and expansive enough to permit us to cover so many of the things that interest my co-host Mike Boland and me. This includes big tech, emerging tech, edge tech, fintech, consumer electronics, consumer trends, the future of work, and really anything that has anything to do with small business.
As long as we steer clear of politics, religion, or space travel (is that local?), we are good to go.
In our latest episode, co-host Mike Boland is joined by guest co-host Jason Cross (who is SVP of Product at Newfold Digital). Jason raised a very explicitly local topic that touches on the biggest of the big tech and business topics of the day.
And those are the promise of AI and the (sorry) state of the local media landscape. One recent estimate we saw says that more than 2,000 local U.S. newspapers have failed over the past few decades.
The conversation starts with Google’s rollout of a new AI tool that writes news articles. It’s easy to see this as a step toward the demise of reporters. I mean, why hire a kid right out of college to write formulaic earnings articles when an AI can do it for the cost of a monthly SaaS subscription?
Both Mike and Jason have print media backgrounds, as do I. So it’s a topic that easily grabs all of our attention.
Helping Local Reporters
Jason takes the subtext that AI is threatening reporters’ jobs in another direction. Perhaps AI is part of the answer to revitalizing local journalism.
After all, a common complaint, even among those not terribly fond of the press, is that local journalism – the process of accurately reporting local stories ranging from the action at high school football games to the actions of city councils – is dead. Or at least its pulse is very weak. This is largely the result of a weak local newspaper business model. And this of course has led to fewer and fewer working local journalists.
Can AI step in as the force multiplier that helps make local journalism great again? On the podcast, Jason suggests that the answer is a solid maybe.
“This tool could help that limited workforce [of local journalists],” Jason says on the episode. “Imagine if it just did all of the city hall updates. Or if it pulled all the data from the local sports events and gave that journalist some thematic story that they can take and write so they are not spending that time researching and pulling facts when they have limited capacity and time. I see that as a potential win.”
You can listen to the full episode on Spotify here:
This thread also encapsulates a prevailing theme of This Week in Local. Is the AI glass half empty or is it half full? It is also a prevailing theme in the zeitgeist. I would argue, and not be alone in doing so, that the issue with the most emotional resonance in the ongoing Hollywood writers’ strike is the future use of AI to create entertainment content.
So is AI a job killer or a force multiplier? This may not be the either/or proposition that it seems to be on the surface. Perhaps it’s more of a both/and.
