A leap forward for AI in journalism is coming from an unexpected place — small-town Missouri

This article is part of “AI is here,” a series from RJI highlighting AI innovation in journalism. Read more here.

Reynolds Journalism Institute — The AI revolution first reared its head more than two years ago with the release of ChatGPT, which sent shockwaves through a news industry eager not to miss the boat on the next big thing. Since then, as machine-learning technology’s adoption by news organizations has proceeded in fits and starts, a gulf has emerged.

Small, community-focused news organizations all over the country have already been dealing with aging hardware, staffing constraints and economic realities that make experimentation difficult, and the rise of AI threatens to push them further behind the curve. At the same time, many of the country’s largest news organizations have acknowledged the need to invest in AI but have proceeded cautiously, keeping much of their experimentation out of public view.

Public-facing AI innovation, then, has largely remained in the domain of Silicon Valley, as was the case during the advent of the internet — an example many in the industry point to as a cautionary tale in which news organizations were unaccountably slow to embrace the next frontier of media.

But more than 2,000 miles away from Silicon Valley in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, a family-owned network of news outlets seems determined to prove that it isn’t too late for local journalism to take charge of its digital destiny.

Rust Communications encompasses 15 newspapers across five states, though most are located in Missouri. Almost all of them, from the Town Courier in rural Blytheville, Arkansas, to the flagship Southeast Missourian in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, now use a content management system (CMS) that one might expect to find in Silicon Valley or at a high-powered national media conglomerate.

You’ve likely heard that AI tools can generate headline suggestions, produce accurate summaries and ensure that all elements of a given story are SEO-friendly. Others can analyze a journalist’s notes and spot an important angle that even an experienced reporter missed in their write-up. Still others can generate illustrative images, determine which article would be best to feature on the homepage or scan an outlet’s news archives to learn the stylistic and grammatical rules it needs to follow.

Many news outlets have taken bits and pieces of these capabilities and attempted to gently massage them into their workflows. Rust Communications’ CMS does them all, it does them well, and it’s all powered by PubGen.AI, a system built by a sister company to its newspapers. In the first three months after Rust launched the CMS across its newspaper network, the publications saw an average 30-45% lift in online traffic. Digital-only subscriptions have grown in a range from 16-37%.

“The performance of this CMS is ridiculously high compared to what’s out there in the industry,” said Jon K. Rust, president of Rust Communications. “It’s all created to use AI in the most positive way because it’s tuned to journalism.”

Readers would be forgiven for dismissing Rust’s optimism as a marketing pitch — indeed, now that the CMS has been rolled out to the company’s newsrooms, it is also being sold to news organizations — but this reporter was given firsthand demonstrations of its capabilities, and “compared to what’s out there,” the difference is stark.

Image generation, for example, is not the comedy of errors that anyone who has tried to “engineer” an image prompt will be familiar with. Parents of toddlers, especially, will be happy to find that Rust’s image generator does not make them feel like their work is at the mercy of a toddler-level intelligence. The various forms of SEO and drafting assistance flow together seamlessly and swiftly, without the need to switch back and forth between a smorgasbord of tools from different sources. (For now, the only exception is a third-party tool for crafting page layouts, though that task, too, will eventually become integrated into the CMS.)

Read RJI's full report here: https://rjionline.org/news/a-leap-forward-for-ai-in-journalism-is-coming-from-an-unexpected-place-small-town-missouri/