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.

@damianradcliffe @jsb We've got to address mobile more at the local level. Would love to talk more about that. #LION15

— Josh Stearns (@jcstearns) October 3, 2015

That’s problematic, considering how many people are getting news on their phones. Jesse Holcomb, an associate director at Pew Research (and recent Press Publish guest) presented on the state of local news, based off this Pew report from the spring.

“The local news experience for American audiences is mediated on the social web,” Holcomb said. “Younger news consumers are getting news about their community on their mobile phone and they’re doing so at rates just as high as other groups, if not higher.”

Local publishers’ reliance on banner advertising is “scary,” said Michele McLellan, the founder of Michele’s List, a database of local news sites. As she put it in a wrapup post on the conference:

There were encouraging, if fledgling, signs that some sites are looking beyond banner display advertising. Supplemental sources include crowd-funding, membership programs, sponsored content, and events. For now, however, banner display advertising is a mainstay…

That’s a vulnerability. If any source falters, companies with diverse revenue sources have others to fall back on. Online display advertising is taking a lot of hits these days, including ad blockers, concerns about impression fraud, and concerns that people simply ignore banner ads.

Some publishers are expanding in this area: Scott Brodbeck, founder of ARLNow and a network of hyperlocal sites in suburban Washington. D.C., described the new sponsored advertising methods he’s using.

.@scottbrodbeck has sponsored columns written by advertisers. Meant to be information on useful topic to readers, not a sales pitch. #LION15

— Ren LaForme (@itsren) October 3, 2015

And Joe Hyde, founder and publisher of the Texas-based San Angelo Live, created a custom ad size for his email newsletters — they’re 570×216, to match the size of an iPhone screen and a finger.

Site founders often develop for the desktop web first, with mobile-optimized or responsive sites sometimes an afterthought. Brian Wheeler, the executive director of Charlottesville Tomorrow, discussed three crowdfunding projects the site has done. Two, where people saw a “pain point,” were successful, but the third — a project that aimed to enhance Charlottesville Tomorrow’s mobile site to make it more similar to the Texas Tribune’s — failed, raising less than a third of its $15,000 goal.

“We thought it would be an easy success via Kickstarter,” Wheeler said. “It did not get anyone motivated to help us. It was too backroom, too infrastructure. People said, ‘I don’t think your site’s that bad on my phone.'”

You can find LION’s blog here, video of some of the presentations here, and the Twitter stream here. In addition, conference attendees took notes in shared Google Docs — here’s the combined coverage of the Friday and Saturday sessions.

A previous version of this post referred to Brian Wheeler as founder of Charlottesville Tomorrow. He is executive director.

Said Steele: “Although we build audience locally, we monetize almost exclusively through national advertising. Eater publishes in 29 markets. But fundamentally, advertisers buy Eater, not Eater Detroit or Eater Miami. Whether we show that impression or takeover to readers in Los Angeles or in New York, most of our advertisers are agnostic about that.”

Building a scalable media business that generates revenue through local advertising has proven a challenge — just ask Patch.

But there are still believers, like Scott Brodbeck. Brodbeck is a local news publisher in suburban Virginia. At a recent conference on hyperlocal marketing, Brodbeck discussed how he had turned hyperlocal news site ARLnow into a profitable business, allowing him to launch Reston Now, his third local news site, in October.

There are, of course, quite a few independent local online publishers who’ve been able to build sustainable for-profit businesses covering a community — The Batavian, Berkeleyside, West Seattle Blog, and more. The membership list of LION (Local Independent Online News Publishers) includes more. But for the most part, those success stories have remained focused on a single community. Brodbeck wants to expand across the region.

“If everybody’s focused on the billion-dollar opportunity in local, they’re going to be missing out on a lot of other opportunities, because this isn’t a billion-dollar space. This is a $1 million space,” he says. “If you can make a million dollars a year doing something in local, that’s not bad.”

That’s why Brodbeck is betting on a scalable local-local strategy — local audiences and local advertisers. “Everybody wants to be the next Foursquare or Instagram,” he says. “Nobody wants to be the guy going to community council meetings and selling ads to Joe Smith.”

Indeed, one of the central tenets of this success has been to focus on — and to expect — slow, incremental growth. “We are a very local site. Everything you need to know about our audience you can learn by reading the demographics of Arlington, Virginia,” says Brodbeck of his flagship site. “You don’t have to use an IP address to figure out where someone is. The fact of the matter is, by and large the only people are people who live in, are from, or work in Arlington, because that’s the only thing we write about.”

When someone writes a comprehensive history of local online news, northern Virginia will play a significant role. As is also true in suburban New Jersey, another early hyperlocal hotbed, the demographics of the D.C. suburbs has made them alluring to those trying to build businesses. Old-timers will remember The Washington Post’s LoudounExtra, which the paper launched in 2007 but ultimately deemed unsustainable after a mere two years. And the late TBD.com was also trying to cover local-level news at a metro-level scale.

Brodbeck saw a digital news gap in Arlington and in other well-off suburban areas and said he was trying to avoid the lessons of something like Loudoun Extra: “the costs were too high and the area it covered was not so much a community as a collection of communities, thus reducing the potential for engagement.”

He’s also chasing that tantalizing white whale of monetization — sponsored content. For Arlington Now, Brodbeck found revenue opportunities in convincing a local liquor store owner to write a sponsored column about beer, and a local accountant to write branded tips around tax season. A friend of his, Brodbeck learned at a dinner party, even bought a house through a real estate agent who wrote sponsored content for the site. (Arlington Now’s “Pet of the Week” is sponsored by a local “gourmet dog bakery and boutique.”)

But finding the right partners and working with them on their brand is half the battle. “There might be places where a local car dealer might have an interesting column, might be a colorful guy and write about cars and be interesting. But we have larger car dealers in Arlington who go through agencies who don’t want to do that. That’s why attempts to nationalize hyperlocal doesn’t really work.”

Sponsored isn’t the majority of Brodbeck’s ad revenue, but the payoff — beyond finding houses for his friends — has been clear. Reston Now is already featuring this type of advertising as well, a frequent sponsored real estate column.

“There’s absolutely a time cost and that’s something that scares a lot of people who are interested in scale away from local,” he says. “It’s a matter of finding a good fit with a good business, and also finding someone who is motivated to write something like that — has the time and ability to write publishable content. It’s not a magic wand where you wave it and then everybody’s doing sponsored content. You really have to approach it on a case-by-case basis to make it work.”

And of course, producing decent journalism doesn’t hurt. Gawker has picked up Brodbeck’s stories before, and he broke the story of a possible Marine Corps Marathon cancellation due to the government shutdown. “The Journatics of the world slurp content off the web and aggregate it,” he says. “It’s not compelling. It’s not something that’s going to get people to check back multiple times per day.”

For Brodbeck, being a local publisher is about pragmatism. If you provide useful content, people will want to read it, and if people are reading it, you’ll be able, with a little patience, to find advertisers who want to reach those people. Considering that Reston Now already has almost 5,000 Facebook followers, it seems like he’s on to something.

I asked Brodbeck who he thought had the right idea in the local space, and he mentioned a few local news sites in the Nashville area.

“You go on Brentwood Home Page — it might not look like the flashiest website in the world, but they’re selling the shit out of it and their advertisers seem happy. That’s really what it’s all about. It’s all an academic exercise unless you get support in the long run,” he says. “This world is a better place when you have more locally focused news outlets that give neighbors a chance to know what’s going on in their community and talk about it. My goal is to keep doing that, and I think there are going to be other entrepreneurs looking to do that. It’ll come — it’ll just be slow.”