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Local audiences want AI guardrails

Local audiences want AI guardrails

Plus: Revenue promiscuity and local news

Paul Gewuerz
November 06, 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:

» Local audiences want AI guardrails

» Local TV changing its playbook

» Watering News Deserts

» A new AI trust kit

🎧 Small Press, Big Ideas Podcast: Revenue promiscuity and local news

🤖 Local audiences want AI guardrails

A national survey released by the National Association of Broadcasters shows that 77% of Americans believe Congress should ban AI from stealing or reproducing journalism without permission or compensation. Only 26% trust AI generated information, and 72% say the federal government should set guardrails to protect local news.

📺 Local TV changing its playbook

TV News Check reports that local TV is reshaping itself around community specific storytelling, leveraging all platforms rather than just traditional broadcast. The focus is shifting to “hyper local” content, with AI tools and FAST channels enabling personalized, multi‑platform distribution of stories tied directly to neighborhoods and viewer interests.

🏜 Watering News Deserts

A new tracking tool from the Reynolds Journalism Institute reveals more than 60 bills across 18 US states aimed at boosting local journalism through tax credits, state ad spend mandates, and fellowship grants, but only seven have become law so far. While the legislation shows promise to reinvigorate news deserts, many models still risk political influence or sudden budget cuts. Read more

📰 A new AI trust kit

Newsrooms now have a new tool, the “AI Trust Kit”, to help them regain reader trust by being transparent about how AI is used in journalism. It gives practical guidance for disclosing AI involvement, reinforcing human oversight, and addressing audience skepticism head on. Read more

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Small Press, Big Ideas

A podcast about the business of local news

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Revenue promiscuity and local news

Founding a local news outlet wasn’t in Joe Coughlin’s original playbook, but his career took a turn that made it inevitable.

Joe, a Chicago native who discovered journalism while studying at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, enjoyed writing and was hired on by 22nd Century Media where he worked for 15 years.

That chapter came to a close at the start of the pandemic, when 22nd Century shuttered due to "the economic impact of the coronavirus on all small businesses, from which we earn a large majority of our advertising base."

Faced with the closure, Joe sat down with some colleagues to plan their next move. According to Joe: “I knew I wanted to at least keep reporting to the people I’d been reporting with and for for the past like decade... And so we decided to come back and build something based on what we learned about communities, how we wanted to build community news.”

Joe and his co-founders ran a kickstarter and launched The Record North Shore six months after the closure of 22nd Century.

This week on the podcast I sat down with Joe to talk about building a newsroom with a “revenue promiscuity” model, community events that they’re thrown including a twist on the popular Hot Ones show, lessons from launching with a Kickstarter, the benefits of taking the nonprofit route as a local news startup, and more lessons learned along the way.

Have a listen to our conversation on your podcast app of choice today!