Local news was the last bastion against corruption and accountability. Living in North India, there was a lot more truth in local news dailies than bigger regional and national newspapers. TV news has become absolutely unwatchable for anyone with interest in truth. How the future of TV news plays out is still unclear but I am cheering for the demise of theatrical entertainment news which comes with news headlines like “na Banerji, na Chatterjee, chalegi musalmanon ki marji” to stoke rage and fear in the majority Hindu population. I hope that these channels will be replaced by actual news but I am not holding my breath for it to happen anytime soon.
The real issue is, the value of local news is not monetizable directly. Journalists on the ground cost money. Earlier it was possible through classifieds, however digital classifieds websites have been much more efficient than newspapers at monetizing this space. In hindsight, it was always a losing game for news organizations, whose DNA is around journalism, not business.
Fortunately, with the advent of cheaper intelligence, it might once again be possible to run local news profitably as the costs reduce significantly. Before you raise your pitchforks and bombard me with why it wouldn’t work1, I would implore you to approach this with more optimism. If we deem this problem worthy of solving, smart autists (like me) would spend significant volunteering effort to solve it. Currently, there’s a lot of publicly available data that LLMs could parse and produce news - local tender news, new infrastructure developments based on Google Maps APIs, budgetary allocations and deployments from the government portals etc. Another untouched avenue is scraping X and Facebook (and potentially local WhatsApp groups if a human is using LLMs with a harness), but this would take away some of the LLM journalist’s objectivity.
The primary message I want you to take away from this piece is - LLMs have made it possible to run local media organizations profitably again. Some free alpha - domains like <city>news.com are still available for INR 599/year2 (<$10).
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There are no APIs to get ground truths, it’s unethical to replace human journalists with AI, If someone is recording political and bureaucratic meetings then they will become performative instead of functional, the layer below data gathering is broken since data is already falsified etc. ↩
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You can be smart about the domains you pick. e.g.
jaipursamachar.com,delhincrsamachar.com,bombay.newsetc are still available for less than INR 1000/year. The reason I haven’t yet bought these domains is, I don’t want to make it difficult for anyone to do this ↩