Local Journalism is Struggling – Could AI Be the Solution?

As the coronavirus continues to ravage the worldwide economy many industries are struggling to survive in the new world order.  One victim of the pandemic is journalism, especially small local newspapers – with so many local businesses running a skeleton operation or closed altogether, advertising revenue has dwindled to almost nil in certain parts of the country, and many local newspapers are laying off huge portions of their staff or even shutting down altogether. While this is a tragedy for all the people and families that are directly affected by the loss of those jobs, it’s also a sad reality for the innumerable small communities that rely on their local outlets to provide news in and around their area. Journalism certainly isn’t the first industry to be hit hard by changing economic realities – factory workers all over the world have found their jobs eliminated by automation and technological advancements in manufacturing processes.  Could local journalism be headed towards a similar fate – and if small communities have no other options for getting their local news, would be that such a bad thing?  Automated robots may not be able to deliver the news, but artificial intelligence might.

AI is already being utilized in fields like customer service and public relations – machine learning tools can learn from studying online help chats between customers and human customer service representatives in order to advance their own conversational ability or examine press releases from the past to help craft them in the future.  Presumably the same principle could apply to news stories – with plenty of previously published material for the AI to learn from, minutes from municipal or county meetings could be synthesized into easily digestible stories for local residents.  Human editors would still be required to proofread the stories and make sure that the AI’s stories weren’t just regurgitating what local governments want their constituencies to believe, but the AI could take care of a lot of the grunt work. While utilizing AI this way may not save many of the stringers and local beat reporters their jobs, it would keep editors (as well as IT staff) employed while maintaining local news coverage in rural areas that badly need it.

It would be foolish not to acknowledge that using AI for news coverage wouldn’t generate some valid concerns. The stories AI could generate would be entirely reliant on the data it has access to – a computer may be able to read city council meeting minutes or the police blotter, but it can’t get to the story behind that data. Artificial intelligence will never take the place of real investigative reporters with their boots on the ground, so to speak – but a lot of local news coverage in particular is reporting basic facts like road closures or details of municipal events. That’s where AI may be able to pick up some of the slack for its human counterparts, allowing journalists to focus their efforts on the kind of in-depth reporting that can’t be done any other way.

Using AI as tool to report news stories will face some heavy resistance from inside and outside the industry, but that’s nothing new – automation in factory and manufacturing settings did too, after all. If cutting costs and automating certain facets of news gathering could ultimately keep local newspapers solvent, wouldn’t that be a better alternative that those newspapers disappearing altogether. Oversight at both the local and global levels would be required, obviously – but as industries all over the world are struggling with the new economic reality, AI could be the answer to saving this one.