The News Roundup in Tuesday’s edition of The Scoop included an item from NiemanLab about Good Day, a company that’s creating AI-generated “local” newsletters for communities across the country — including one aimed at Athens.
A reader sent us one of the emailed newsletters in December. That issue featured “7 Breaking Stories in Athens Today,” including four items from WOUB Public Media, one from the Athens Messenger and two from Ohio University.
Because the items were short blurbs with a link to the original story, the newsletter doesn’t violate copyright laws. And if all it was doing was referring traffic to news sites, I’d be all for it. But Good Day doesn’t exist to help local news outlets increase our audiences.
The company accepts donations from readers and sells advertising. That means that the company’s owner — its sole employee — is earning money off other people’s work. The newsletter is assembled by a bit of code that crawls local news websites, generates story summaries and slaps a link in it. The only thing Good Day pays for is server space … and, quite likely, personal information gleaned and sold by Facebook and other social media companies.
Meanwhile, WOUB Public Media is bracing for the possible elimination of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The Messenger and the Athens News continue to limp along on the crumbs sprinkled its way by Adams Publishing Group. And the Athens County Independent tries to keep bringing you in-depth reporting while building a small business.
So, for the love of all that is holy, don’t fall for the AI bait. Stick with sources that you know are truly local — like The Indy.
By the way, we’re going to start sending The Indy on Friday mornings, rather than on Thursdays. We generally find ourselves scrambling on Thursdays to finish editing stories and get them online. We’ll still be scrambling on Thursdays, but we won’t have the added pressure of getting a newsletter out the same day.
Watch your email next Friday morning for The Indy!
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