On first glance, Good Day Fort Collins appears to be a standard local news round-up.
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“I’m a senior citizen here in Fort Collins, and this newsletter is like a lifeline. I don’t have the attention span these days to read the paper, and Facebook is a mess,” reads one testimonial on the sign-up page from “Matthew K., retiree.” “I use Good Day Fort Collins to keep one foot in the town I grew up in, and my friends and family continue to live in,” says “Michael H., expat.”
Google those quotes, though, and you’ll find the same names and testimonials supporting hundreds of other local newsletters across the U.S. “Matthew K.” also lives in Queen Creek, Arkansas; and Post Falls, Idaho; and Marysville, Washington; and Denton, Texas. “Michael H.” grew up in each of these towns, and many more.
It turns out Good Day Fort Collins is just one in a network of AI-generated newsletters operating in 355 cities and towns across the U.S.
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“Local news should be local. The problem is, at this point, there are economic challenges keeping that from happening. Smaller communities rarely can support enough staff to run a traditional news organization,” said Henderson, who currently runs Good Daily from New York City. “I see technology, and LLMs specifically, as our best shot to fix this.”
In fact, Henderson sees his automated newsletter as boosting the work of struggling local news outlets. “The summary is designed to prompt the reader to go read the human’s content…it’s just AI’s job to promote that,” he said. “Local news providers appreciate our work promoting their best local content for free, and often seek out ways for us to promote even more of their content.”
Henderson’s rosy view of his impact on local news publishing was not shared by several outlets I spoke to that are regularly aggregated by Good Daily.
“His claim is, frankly, horseshit. The suggestion that he’s helping news deserts is absurd,” said Rodney Gibbs, the head of audience and product at the National Trust for Local News (NTLN). The nonprofit owns 65 local newspapers across Georgia, Maine, and Colorado, several of which are regularly aggregated by Good Daily newsletters.
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“Consider the Georgia markets he’s targeting — most already have multiple, established news sources that he is recycling as fodder for his newsletters,” said Gibbs. Henderson’s Daily Macon, for example, regularly aggregates half a dozen different publications, including The Middle Georgia Times, the website for NBC affiliate WMGT, and The Macon Melody, NTLN’s own digital outlet, which it launched last summer.
Over the past 90 days, referrals from Daily Macon totaled four engaged sessions, according to Gibbs. “That puts it at the very bottom of our referral sources. It’s clear that Daily Macon is not a meaningful traffic driver,” he said. (In its advertiser media kit, Daily Macon says it has 13,300 subscribers in Georgia and a 26% click-to-open rate.)
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The peculiarities with Good Daily don’t stop there. Henderson has launched a “give back” program in roughly half of the markets he’s operating in, more than 150 towns and cities. Readers can vote each day for one local nonprofit on the newsletter websites. At the end of the year, each newsletter promises to “donate 10% of our advertising profits” to the organization with the most votes.
The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Washington won the 2024 reader competition for Daily Spokane. “News to us,” said Marit Fisher, the museum’s chief marketing officer. “None of us here have ever heard of this newsletter.”
LLMs are a dream for olde timey hucksters.