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Patch, according to Warren St. John, its CEO, is “a little shop that’s trying to do this kind of antiquated thing that everybody is giving up on.” That “antiquated thing”—hyperlocal news—became less old-timey when, last spring, the company announced the rollout of AI newsletters that could reach as many as thirty thousand communities. Give the site your zip code and it would produce a daily or twice-weekly newsletter customized for your town, for a minimum readership of one subscriber. “Once we get a sign-up, then we start generating it,” St. John told me. Since then, PatchAM, as it’s known, which carries local and national advertising, has been activated in fourteen thousand communities and has accrued nearly a million subscribers.
PatchAM provides the most value to places with few or zero outlets providing local news. The newsletters rely heavily on aggregation, automated event calendars, and posts from Nextdoor. They ask users to submit photos of their pets and throw in a riddle. “This is a utility,” St. John said. “This is not the high church of journalism. This is about creating a foothold in a relationship and meeting a need.” The PatchAM for my community—Frederick, Maryland—is functional, if strange. The top item in a recent newsletter (with national corporate sponsor T-Mobile) announced the public meeting of an obscure domestic violence panel. Others pulled items from a high school newspaper and from a national outlet, Straight Arrow News, that rates the bias of news stories (it happened to mention our city). There was nothing from the Frederick News-Post, our six-days-a-week paper, or the Baltimore Banner, which sometimes covers our county. I asked St. John if this was by design—it was not—though he stressed the newsletters try to avoid niche or divisive topics, such as local politics. “People don’t want everything about their community, they want the most important things,” he said. “They don’t want to know that tomorrow night in town is third-grade parent-teacher night. That’s not broadly relevant. But they would want to know that the Greek food festival is on Main Street this weekend and everybody’s invited.”
Patch is far from the only local news publisher experimenting with AI for tasks ranging from scraping meeting minutes to producing articles. In a recent column, the top editor of the Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com revealed that his newsroom had begun using “AI rewrite specialists” to all but eliminate writing from some reporters’ workloads. Last year, USA Today Co. (formerly Gannett), the largest newspaper publisher in the country, began using AI to create content for several of its hyperlocal sites in the Boston suburbs—two years after pausing its spotty AI-generated high school sports recaps. McClatchy has been doing a lot of experimenting with AI, including at the Tacoma News Tribune, in Washington State, rewriting local stories and packaging them as national clickbait. In Maine, the Midcoast Villager, a regional weekly, partnered with an AI startup that’s developing a tool to summarize public meetings for newsrooms—something that Patch is also working on. In a recent internal Slack conversation at the Associated Press, Aimee Rinehart, the company’s senior product manager for AI, wrote that many editors “would prefer an AI-written article to a human-written one.”
But there’s a reason to watch Patch in particular: the company knows how to turn a profit. It has mostly been in the black since its 2014 purchase by Charles Hale, an investor specializing in tech turnarounds. Under Hale Global’s ownership, Patch has been willing to experiment and fail. In 2023, the company ended a precursor to PatchAM that used humans, not AI, to curate newsletters on a much smaller scale; the program ultimately wasn’t viable. As a for-profit, Patch is always trying to solve for “some component of the riddle of how to make this sustainable,” St. John said. “We’ve never really taken the nonprofit route of shaking a tin can with a nickel in it and trying to get more nickels from billionaires. And no knock on that—it leads to some amazing nonprofit local journalism. But our piece of this has been to take on the business riddle, because we think that’s going to be the more sustainable thing. I think when you look at what happened at the Washington Post, you see what happens when a billionaire changes his mind.”
Patch’s AI does mess up. It might pull news from the wrong city. (“‘It’s the wrong Springfield’—we hear that at least single-digit times a week,” St. John said.) Readers also complain about links to paywalled sites, which is a feature, not a bug, of the algorithm, to St. John. “We want people to support the local news ecosystem. If our machine keeps sending you there, it’s because it’s a great source of local information,” he said. Only two news outlets in the country have opted out of PatchAM, he told me.
The good news—at least for human journalists—is that, according to a recent report from the Reuters Institute, even as media literacy declines, readers can identify AI-generated news content, and they do not like it as much as human writing. For publishers, the question becomes whether AI-produced news can create value for both subscribers and advertisers. “Can newsletters deliver something of value to people that they cannot easily get elsewhere for free?” Felix Simon, an author of the Reuters Institute report, wondered in an email to me. (St. John did not share how much the AI newsletters contribute to the company’s bottom line compared with its human-led sites.)
Patch’s next big AI endeavor is developing a tool to do the grunt work of recapping town meetings, which, unlike PatchAM, would be used in the company’s newsrooms. “Can we take a long, boring town hall meeting on YouTube and generate a transcript and then summarize that and scan it for news nuggets? We’re trying all sorts of things to speed us along,” St. John said. “If people are sending rockets into space and cars are driving themselves, I think we can apply this technology to do our jobs better and more efficiently.”
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