Juice it. OpenAI will fund four new Axios Local newsrooms, in Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Boulder, and Huntsville. While the ChatGPT parent company has fingers (tentacles?) in all sort of newsroom initiatives, this is the first time it’s directly paying for newsroom launches. That funding lasts three years, Axios CEO Jim VandeHei told me. ““This deal only took off when the conversation turned to juicing local news, for us but also in ways that might help others,” he said. “We were skeptical any company would care enough to put deep thought into it — but OpenAI did. We spent six months brainstorming and came up with something exciting to us and them. It is purely additive to our Axios Local project — nothing we do depends on OpenAI but everything we do could be improved with their AI savvy.”
Sue it. The Des Moines Register faces a second Trumpy lawsuit over Ann Selzer’s November 2 Iowa poll showing Kamala Harris ahead of Trump. (Trump ended up winning the state by about 13 points.) A conservative law firm filed the suit on behalf of a Register subscriber who apparently wants his $69.99 (the cost of a one-year digital subscription) back. The lawsuit has “a familiar Trumpian bombast, and trots out both typical and more tailored rightwing attack lines against mainstream media,” Sophie wrote — but also includes “the occasional echoes of reasonable critiques of the media. Though co-opted, distorted, and weaponized for partisan purposes here, threads running through the case reflect the ways many Americans feel alienated by and distrustful of the press, polls, and experts.”
Expand it. The Conversation is trying to make its academia-fueled model work for local news, Josh reported. The Conversation Local, now a year old, “has launched in four markets across the U.S., connecting experts at local universities to local issues and distributing their work for free to dozens of local news outlets — most in those markets, but sometimes beyond.” You can see the most recent stories here.
Revive it. New research shows that statehouse reporting — long seen as a beleaguered beat — could be primed for a comeback. At least in one state, “narratives of decline are more misleading than clarifying,” Matthew Powers of the University of Washington wrote for us. “It would be facile to imply a return to any mythical golden age, or declare without reservations a bright future. It does, however, suggest a revitalization of statehouse reporting.”
