A right-wing media chain tried to replace 47 newspapers with AI. They all died.

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Get stories like this sent to you every Friday: Subscribe for free.<br>Link: The Ghost Paper That Ate Alabama: How a Media Startup Killed 47 Weekly Newspapers and No One Noticed, by Elena Marchetti in The Editorial<br>This is a horrifying story: 47 small, local, weekly newspapers were acquired by a man with ambitions to create a new conservative media empire. He fired much of their staff and replaced them with AI — with predictable results. Subscriptions fell, there were accuracy and ethics issues, and the papers even lost their printing contracts because local print shops didn’t want to print slop. The media empire fizzled out.<br>This isn’t the first time someone has bought into the AI marketing — and had a disregard for human expertise — enough to make a foolish staffing decision. Companies as big as Ford have sacked humans in favor of AI only to backtrack with their tails between their legs and re-hire. But here the aftermath was news deserts in 43 of the poorest communities in America. When a community becomes a news desert, it is more likely to experience corruption, making them still more vulnerable.<br>But for me, the most important part of the story is what the communities did next:<br>“In three towns, residents have started volunteer-run Facebook groups to share local news. In one — Grove Hill, population 1,800 — a retired teacher named Evelyn Petty has taken it upon herself to write a weekly newsletter, which she prints on her home laser printer and distributes at the post office. “It’s not a newspaper,” she says. “But it’s something.” She has seventy-three subscribers. Each pays $20 a year. She loses money on every issue.”<br>Community news is so important that, in the absence of anything else, people will spontaneously start groups, publish newsletters, and fill the void however they can. (It’s also not lost on me that Facebook groups — in other words, community spaces — have, with journalistic support, the potential to occupy that gap.) But they need support.<br>I’m reminded of the story of Kari Mar, who launched a non-profit community newsroom, La Conner Community News after her local paper shut down. That effort succeeded to the extent that she could buy a neighboring community’s struggling weekly paper. Similarly, I recently had the privilege of meeting Amy Bushatz, whose non-profit Mat-Su Sentinel in Alaska bought its local weekly in order to revitalize it.<br>Both are supported by Tiny News Collective, which supports early-stage local news funders. I recently joined the board, and will write more about their work in a future post. Not only are these new local startup newsrooms a way to prevent news deserts and the kind of strip-mining the newsletters in this story were subject to, but they’re also more likely to innovate with models for news. I think they offer some hope for both the future of news itself and as democratic infrastructure for the communities they support. And in turn, they deserve our support.

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Ben Werdmuller explores the intersection of technology, democracy, and society. Always independently published, reader-supported, and free to read.

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