Patch’s AI Experiment: Thousands of Newsletters, Zero Humans

Peter Kafka discusses the evolving role of AI in media with Warren St. John, CEO of Patch, a local news company now using AI to produce newsletters for thousands of communities. Patch's AI-driven product, PatchAM, aggregates and curates local news, events, and information without human intervention, offering a scalable solution to the challenges of local journalism. While AI handles the summarization and distribution, Patch maintains a team of human reporters for original content in select areas. St. John emphasizes the importance of a sustainable, trustworthy news model and the potential for AI to complement human journalism by automating routine tasks.

• Discussion on the evolution of AI in media from a speculative concept to a practical tool for content creation.
• Introduction to Patch, a local news company using AI to cover thousands of communities without human involvement.

"Today we're talking about AI, of course, because it's 2025, specifically about AI and media."

• Highlights the focus on AI's role in transforming media by 2025.

"Patch, the local news company, announced it was going to start covering news in thousands of communities around the country solely using AI, zero humans involved."

• Patch's bold move to automate local news coverage using AI technology.

• Patch's background as a hyperlocal news site inherited from AOL, now leading in AI-generated news.
• The company maintains a newsroom of 85 full-time reporters for original reporting alongside AI-powered products.

"We inherited from them coverage of around 1,000 communities... we're not going to do 29 versions of that story. We're going to do a single version and distribute it to the right geographically relevant communities."

• Patch's strategy to efficiently cover numerous communities with limited human resources.

"We're an organization that's committed to working for a sustainable model for local news."

• Patch's mission to create a sustainable model for local news without external philanthropic support.

• Patch can produce newsletters for approximately 30,000 communities, currently active in 11,000.
• The newsletters, primarily designed for inbox delivery, summarize local headlines, events, and news from various sources.

"We can produce a newsletter now for every... community in the United States... currently we're live in about 11,000 of those."

• Patch's capability to scale newsletter production to a vast number of communities using AI.

"It's a newsletter first product... Tells you the headlines, relevant headlines for the day, upcoming local events."

• Description of the AI-generated newsletter content and its focus on community relevance.

• AI is primarily used for curating information based on newsworthiness and relevance, filtering digital information about communities.
• The system avoids irrelevant details, focusing on broadly relevant community information.

"We've built a system that's really around the curation... to try to surface what is the most valuable information about your community."

• AI's function in curating community information to ensure relevance and value to the audience.

"People don't want to know everything about their communities... We built a system that's really around the curation."

• Emphasizes the importance of selective information curation to meet community interest and relevance.

• Initial human involvement in product development, focusing on rule-setting and system design.
• No human intervention in the newsletter creation process once the system is operational.

"Not at all. Now, we spent a year as humans working on the product, so."

• Clarifies the absence of human involvement in the day-to-day AI-driven newsletter production.

• Simplicity is crucial for scalability and effectiveness in product design.
• Complexity introduces edge cases that result in suboptimal outcomes.
• The product was initially launched in specific locations to gather user feedback and refine its functionality.

"The simpler something is, the easier it is to scale. So simplicity has been kind of a north star from the beginning."

• Simplicity is a guiding principle for scalability and efficiency in product development.

• Many towns share names, necessitating a taxonomy to associate publications correctly.
• The system must also capture relevant national publications to ensure comprehensive coverage.
• Missing significant features from major publications is a failure in the product's duty.

"A third of us towns share a name with another town in some other place. So you can't just filter on keywords or something. You've got to build a taxonomy that says these publications are associated with this town."

• Addressing the issue of towns with shared names requires a sophisticated taxonomy to ensure accurate publication association.

• The product is not meant to replace human journalists but to complement their work.
• AI can handle publicly available information but lacks the nuanced reporting of human journalists.
• The analogy of a five-course meal versus a kind bar illustrates the difference between comprehensive local coverage and basic news delivery.

"You make a great point. You make a point of saying over and over that, that you've got 85 human journalists working for you. This is not meant to replace their work."

• The role of AI is to supplement, not replace, human journalists, emphasizing the value of human-led reporting.

• AI provides basic, reliable news coverage, akin to a nutritious snack rather than a full meal.
• Local news encompasses a broad range of topics, including community events and announcements.
• Historical local newspapers included a mix of investigative journalism and community announcements.

"The AI newsletter is really a kind bar. It is. It's got some basic nutritious kind of components. It's tasty."

• AI-generated newsletters provide essential information but lack the depth of full journalistic coverage.

• The product relies on existing local newspapers and TV stations for content.
• The closure of these sources poses a significant challenge to the product's distribution capabilities.
• The product directs traffic to original publications, supporting them despite potential paywalls.

"When we include a headline from another publication in the newsletter that link clicks directly to that publication."

• The product supports local publications by directing traffic to their original content, even when behind a paywall.

• AI can assist reporters by summarizing transcripts from public meetings, enhancing their efficiency.
• The vision includes using AI to access and synthesize information from digital sources like YouTube.
• This approach amplifies reporters' capabilities, allowing them to cover more ground effectively.

"Use AI to get a transcript of the, the YouTube video and then essentially to read through it and summarize it."

• AI's role in summarizing content from digital sources helps reporters focus on more critical aspects of news gathering.

• Technological advancements have altered the value and role of journalists, with bots and crawlers affecting news distribution.
• The prevalence of bots has reduced the click-through rate for original content, impacting the perceived value of news articles.
• Journalists are encouraged to focus on uncovering new stories rather than summarizing existing information, as machines can do the latter more efficiently.

"These crawlers, these bots, are crawling all of our news websites and stealing our stuff and giving the answer in full, whether it's Google or OpenAI to the end user, and they're clicking through at a much lower rate."

• The quote highlights the challenge faced by journalists as technology enables the rapid dissemination of information without the need for direct engagement with original sources.

"The value of that information, because it's already out there available to others, is much lower than the things people don't know yet, the things that aren't online."

• This emphasizes the importance of original reporting and uncovering new information as a way to maintain the value of journalism in the face of technological changes.

• Aggregation of content from various sources remains valuable, but its significance is shifting due to technological capabilities.
• The focus is on providing unique and comprehensive content that cannot be easily replicated by competitors or technology companies.
• Patch, as a publication, aggregates content but also aims to enrich and improve its offerings through community engagement and feedback.

"If it's something that is working for you guys, then presumably it's available to anyone else. You guys are not a tech company, you're a publishing company that's kind of tech forward."

• This quote underscores the competitive nature of content aggregation, where the ability to innovate and enhance offerings is crucial for maintaining relevance and audience engagement.

"We have a product roadmap around enriching this product and making it better and better."

• The focus on continuous improvement and enhancement of aggregated content is highlighted as a strategy to stay ahead in the publishing industry.

• Community involvement is crucial for providing relevant and localized content, with readers contributing announcements and news.
• Verification of community-contributed content is essential to maintain credibility and accuracy.
• Patch emphasizes the importance of understanding community needs and providing solutions to their informational challenges.

"There's a lot of community news that people want to contribute. So we're making, you know, that's, that's a channel that we're opening up."

• This quote illustrates the role of community contributions in enriching the content offered by Patch and the importance of facilitating channels for such contributions.

"We really take our guidance from our readers. What are they struggling to understand or find out about life in their communities that we might be able to provide them."

• The emphasis on reader feedback and understanding community needs is a key strategy for Patch to remain relevant and valuable to its audience.

• The discussion emphasizes the importance of maintaining a competitive edge and building a trusted brand, especially in the local news sector.
• Trust in information sources is highlighted as a significant value add, differentiating reliable publications from those with unclear agendas.
• The conversation touches on the need for continuous improvement and innovation to stay ahead in the competitive landscape.

"I do think brand is important because even in local, or maybe especially in local, there are a lot of publications that you just don't know if you can trust."

• Trustworthiness is key in the local news industry, where many publications may lack transparency.

"We try to be very careful and methodical and put things, you know, we feel, I think we're very sort of jobs to be done product conscious and jobs to be done holds that faster and more accurate wins over time."

• Emphasizes a methodical approach to product development, focusing on accuracy and reliability.

• The use of machines and automation in content creation is acknowledged, with an emphasis on transparency to users.
• There is a discussion on the balance between disclosing automation use and maintaining user trust.
• The role of automation in enhancing content delivery and efficiency is explored.

"You guys were upfront about the fact that you're using machines to produce this stuff. You've talked about it in the press."

• Transparency about automation in content production is acknowledged as a practice.

"We don't have AI articles, we don't write fake machine articles. So, you know, the diff. The differentiator is that all of our articles are bylined with people's names."

• Differentiates between machine-generated content and human-authored articles, emphasizing authenticity.

• The importance of user feedback in refining and improving the product is highlighted.
• Readers are encouraged to provide feedback on content relevance and accuracy, which informs product iterations.
• The iterative process involves adjusting content based on user input to enhance user experience.

"There's a thumbs up, thumbs down, you know, under each news headline where you can tell us it didn't fit, it wasn't relevant to me, it wasn't local, maybe it was the wrong town."

• User feedback mechanisms are in place to ensure content relevance and accuracy.

"We're constantly iterating on the product based on that feedback, but the readers seem to very much understand that they're giving feedback to a machine."

• The iterative process is driven by user feedback, with an understanding of the role of automation.

• The development process involved addressing numerous edge cases to ensure content accuracy and relevance.
• Future expansion plans include improving content sources and enhancing user contributions.
• Monetization strategies are aligned with local relevance, focusing on SMBs and event marketing.

"The hardest part is really all the edge cases. There are just so many."

• Addressing edge cases is a significant challenge in ensuring content accuracy.

"The other big initiatives are around user contributions."

• Future development includes enhancing user contributions to enrich content.

"We're trying to align the monetization experience with the local. What people love about the locality of the product."

• Monetization strategies are designed to maintain local relevance and enhance user experience.