🤖 A trustworthy AI assistant?

Plus: What newsrooms owe their readers

Author

Paul Gewuerz
December 04, 2025

Your weekly briefing of stories from around the local news space about business, policy, trends, and more

Hello! Here’s what’s in this week’s issue:

» A trustworthy AI assistant?

» News media is “becoming part of AI systems”

» Local TV News Survival Guide

» Students stepping up to fill the local news void

» ONA, Press Forward join Rebuild Local News

🎧 Small Press, Big Ideas Podcast: What newsrooms owe their readers

🤖 A trustworthy AI assistant?

Stanford Institute for Human Centered AI (HAI) and its collaborators have built DataTalk, a new AI assistant aimed at helping investigative journalists dig into large public datasets quickly, offering analysis, code, and plain English explanations. It’s designed to make data heavy reporting feasible for shrinking local newsrooms while increasing transparency and preserving the journalistic standards that many earlier AI powered tools failed to meet. Read more

📲 News media is “becoming part of AI systems”

News media is increasingly becoming a core part of AI systems, not just using AI as a tool, but being built into the AI‑driven infrastructure for content discovery, summarization, and delivery. Nieman Lab reports on how The JournalismAI Festival 2025 highlighted how publishers worldwide are wrestling with AI’s potential to transform reporting, drive distribution, and reshape trust in journalism.

📺 Local TV News Survival Guide

The Reinventing Local TV News Project is hosting a Local TV News Survival Guide live event on December 9th to explore the impact of digital content creators in today’s media landscape. The guide says hiring dedicated “digital content creators,” producing native digital first videos, and rethinking success metrics are essential if local TV news wants to stay relevant. Read more

👩‍🎓 Students stepping up to fill the local news void

Students are stepping up to help fill the local news void: across the US, university programs are partnering with struggling newsrooms or even launching their own publications so student reporters can cover stories in communities that otherwise wouldn’t get any local reporting.

📰 ONA, Press Forward join Rebuild Local News

Rebuild Local News announced that Press Forward and the Online News Association (ONA) have just joined its coalition, expanding its network of advocates working to revive local journalism.

💰 Multiply Your Ad Space With LocalPod

Readers aren’t the only audience. LocalPod.co gives you listeners too: automated podcasts that multiply ad space, expand reach, and generate new income streams.

Small Press, Big Ideas

A podcast about the business of local news

What newsrooms owe their readers

This week on the podcast I had a great conversation with Ed Arnold, the Editor-in-Chief of the San Antonio Business Journal about his unexpected path into journalism, the philosophy behind business reporting, and the changing landscape of local media.

Ed’s argument for paywalled content is pretty rock solid and something that anyone with a paywall should keep in mind: make it worth it. That means that Ed’s team knows their reporting mandate, the audience that they’re serving, and what makes a great story.

Listen to our full conversation in your podcast app of choice to hear our conversation about AI's potential (and limits), event based journalism revenue, the pitfalls of relying on platforms like Facebook for audience engagement, and a whole lot more!

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