Though it could expand his outlet’s reach — especially, in his words, as email becomes increasingly important “as a distribution channel with social media declining as a traffic source” — Brodbeck didn’t think creating an additional newsletter was an optimal use of reporter time in the zero-sum, resource-strapped reality of running a hyperlocal news outlet.

“As much as I would love to have a 25-person newsroom covering Northern Virginia, the reality is that we can only sustainably afford an editorial team of eight across our three sites: two reporters/editors per site, a staff [photographer], and an editor,” he said. In short, tapping a reporter to write a morning newsletter would limit ARLnow’s reporting bandwidth.

But with the exponential improvement of AI tools like GPT-4, Brodbeck saw an opportunity to have it both ways: He could generate a whole new newsletter without cutting into journalists’ reporting time. So last month, he began experimenting with a completely automated weekday morning newsletter comprising an AI-written introduction and AI summaries of human-written stories. Using tools like Zapier, Airtable, and RSS, ARLnow can create and send the newsletter without any human intervention.

Since releasing the handbook, Amditis has heard that many publishers and reporters “seem to really appreciate the possibility and potential of using automation for routine tasks,” he told me in an email. Like Brodbeck and others, he believes “AI can save time, help small newsrooms scale up their operations, and even create personalized content for their readers and listeners,” though he raised the widely held concern about “the potential loss of that unique human touch,” not to mention the questions of accuracy, reliability and a hornets’ nest of ethical concerns.

Even when instructing AI to summarize content, Amditis described similar challenges to those Brodbeck has encountered. There’s “a tendency for the summaries and bullet points to sound repetitive if you don’t create variables in your prompts that allow you to adjust the tone/style of the responses based on the type of content you’re feeding to the bot,” he said.

But “the most frustrating part of the work I’ve been doing with publishers of all sizes over the last few months is the nearly ubiquitous assumption about using AI for journalism (newsletters or otherwise) is that we’re out here just asking the bots to write original content from scratch — which is by far one of the least useful applications, in my opinion,” Amditis added.

Brodbeck agrees. “AI is “not a replacement for original local reporting,” he said. “It’s a way to take what has already been reported and repackage it so as to reach more readers.”

In July, it closed Hill Now, its site covering the Capitol Hill neighborhood, and merged its coverage with another one of its sites, Borderstan, which focused on a handful of neighborhoods near Dupont Circle. Then, in December, with revenue flagging, the company also shut down Borderstan, which was run by two full-time employees and averaged 85,000 unique visitors per month.

“We were not generating enough advertising revenue to pay for the brand of journalism we were creating,” Local News Now founder Scott Brodbeck told me.

The company still operates two hyperlocal sites in D.C.’s Virginia suburbs — ARLnow in Arlington and Reston Now in Reston. The company has five full-time employees, including Brodbeck. One of the former Borderstan staffers has joined ARLnow; the other has left the company.

Local News Now is blessed with unusually fertile ground for a local news site; the D.C. metro area has the highest median income of any in America, and its suburbs are even richer. (Arlington County has the sixth highest median household income of any county in the United States. Fairfax County, which includes Reston, ranks even higher, third.)

Local News Now exceeded $500,000 in revenue for the first time in 2016. “The sites in Virginia are solidly profitable and the company itself is profitable,” Brodbeck said. ARLnow averages 250,000 unique visitors per month and Reston Now has 70,000 uniques.

Brodbeck and I discussed the thinking behind the decision to shutter the two D.C. sites, what’s next for Local News Now, and why he thinks digital advertising can still be a sustainable revenue source for hyperlocal outlets. Here’s a condensed version of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

I would argue that the same applies to banner advertising. It gets a bad rap as not particularly effective. I’m sympathetic to that on a more national level. It seems like the biggest thing is programmatic and targeting. How do we target specific users? That is a very inexact science. On Twitter not too long ago, I was going off about how the ads I see on the web, Facebook excluded, if they’re targeting to me, I have no idea how they’re doing the targeting.

On local, it basically is targeted. It’s automatically geotargeted. If we have an advertiser who is in Arlington and trying to reach people in Arlington: Guess what? We reach people who live and work in Arlington exclusively. I think relevance is important in advertising, and local is automatically relevant to connecting local advertisers to local readers. I think that display advertising is going to continue, though I hope we continue to find other ways to connect our clients with our readers.