University of Kwazulu-Natal

Local News Unleashed How Inside Arlington Is Using Ai To Cover Town

Bonisiwe Shabane
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local news unleashed how inside arlington is using ai to cover town

On October 25, 2023, the AI Literacy Lab and the Northeastern School of Journalism hosted a lunch with Winston Chen and David Trilling, the founders and editors of Inside Arlington, an experimental website that... Chen is a technology entrepreneur who sold a speech-to-text technology. Trilling is a former foreign correspondent who ran a newswire about Asian news. What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of the conversation about their new project and its implications. Joanna Weiss, executive director, AI Literacy Lab: How and why did you start this website? Winston Chen: It started with a dog.

One morning I went walking the dog and there was a lot of uproar in the dog park. Through the pandemic, leash laws were not enforced very much.. But all of a sudden, people were getting fined. All the dog owners were up in arms. I said, “Let’s go to the Parks and Recreation Commission,” because I know that’s where the rules get made. And then everybody’s like, “Oh” — just a collective groan.

“Two and a half hours. I don’t have time for that.” When David and I started talking about this, I suddenly realized that here’s an area where AI can play a big role. I spent a few years at MIT Media Lab, and one of the hot topics back then was the destruction of local news. We thought, the problem with local news is largely economics. So what if we can provide any local news outfit with a set of tools?

Not just technology, but also human resources, legal, finance, various types of support so that the person who’s responsible for a local news outlet just has to worry about the content. “Local news in a box” was the idea that was born. We put it aside, we got busy with other stuff, and now with all of these thoughts [about AI], that idea has bubbled up again. October 24, 2023 / 7:30 AM EDT / CBS Boston ARLINGTON - Could artificial intelligence be the savior of local journalism? Two neighbors in Arlington want to keep people aware of what is happening in their cities and towns and they believe AI could be the key.

Winston Chen and David Trilling have created the non-profit Nano Media. "David and I have had conversations about local news for years. We share the concerns of a lot of people around the country about the disappearance of local news," Chen told WBZ-TV. Low levels of trust, interest in early days of new products By Aidan Ryan | March 10th, 2025, 2:41 AM Startups in Arlington, Marblehead, and the South Shore have cropped up in recent years with the same mission: utilize artificial intelligence to help cover local government and keep residents informed at a time when...

Far from taking reporters’ jobs, these efforts seek to add something — anything — to the civic conversation in communities that have seen their local newspapers and broadcast stations collapse. But the organizers of some of the projects say they face a huge obstacle: trust from the audiences they hope to help. It’s early days for AI-assisted journalism, and some efforts are just getting off the ground. Others have already pulled the plug, however, citing a lack of interest and engagement. “I was walking my dog around the dog park one morning,” said Winston Chen, a resident of Arlington, Massachusetts. “During the pandemic, leash laws weren’t enforced.

Now they’ve started getting fined for having dogs off leash. All the dog owners were upset.” But when Chen recommended they approach the town’s parks and recreation commission, he received groans. “Two and a half hours? They had no time for that,” Chen recalled. So he teamed up with his neighbor, longtime journalist David Trilling, to brainstorm ideas on how they could empower artificial intelligence to deliver the local government’s services to the people of Arlington.

They started a nonprofit, Nano Media, which uses AI to power their first local news project, Inside Arlington. Trilling and Chen recently discussed their work at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism. They told students and faculty members they had identified a gap in awareness of the town’s inner workings. Inside Arlington, they said, can distill information residents need in a timely and organized fashion. They coined the idea “local news in a box.” With the exception of the police log (privacy concerns complicate that), they wanted to automate as much content as possible. One way was through the transcription of government meetings.

Several Boston-area news publications are using artificial intelligence to generate articles for their websites, according to a human-written story by editor Dan O’Brien of MetroWest Daily News. In the story, O’Brien mentions MetroWest Daily News, Milford Daily News and Wicked Local — all owned by the media company Gannett, which publishes USA TODAY and hundreds of newspapers — are using an... Interview requests to the local papers were referred to Gannett Corporate Communications & Public Relations spokespeople. In a statement, the company confirmed to GBH News that McDermott is a real person. “By leveraging AI, we are able to expand coverage and enable our journalists to focus on more in-depth reporting,” a spokesperson said in the statement. “With human oversight at every step, AI-assisted reporting meets our high standards for quality and accuracy to provide our readers more valuable content which they’ve always associated with the USA TODAY Network.”

McDermott’s AI-assisted stories come with a note at the bottom stating that “Journalists were involved in every step of the information gathering, review, editing and publishing process” and linking to Gannett’s ethical conduct standards,... Among the more venerable local news startups in the Boston area is YourArlington, which has been publishing in one form or another since 2006. Founded by veteran journalist Bob Sprague, the digital-only site in the past couple of years has gone nonprofit, added a governing board, and hired an editor, Judith Pfeffer, who succeeded Sprague when he retired... YourArlington offers fairly comprehensive coverage of the town and has paid freelancers. (Disclosure: Some of those paid freelancers have been Northeastern students, and I’ve been asked to speak at Sprague’s retirement party in November.) So imagine my surprise when I read Boston Globe tech reporter Hiawatha Bray’s story about Inside Arlington, a new project that is mainly produced by artificial intelligence: feed in the transcript of a select...

Mainly I was surprised that Bray let cofounder Winston Chen get away with this whopper: “The town of Arlington, for practical purposes, is a news desert.” Bray offered no pushback, and there’s no mention... (Gannett merged the weekly Arlington Advocate with the Winchester Star about a year and a half ago and eliminated nearly all town-based coverage in favor of regional stories. There’s also a local Patch.) Bray is properly skeptical, noting that several experiments in AI-generated stories have come to a bad end and that there’s no substitute for having a reporter on site who can ask follow-up questions. Still, there’s no question that AI news reporting is coming. Nieman Lab recently reported on a hyperlocal news organization in California that’s been giving AI a workout, although that organization — so far — has had the good sense not to publish the results.

But it’s disheartening to see the Globe take at face value the claim that Arlington lacks a local news organization. Scanning through YourArlington right now, I see a story about affordable housing that was posted today, a restaurant review, a story and photos from Town Day and a reception for the new town manager. Such coverage is the lifeblood of community journalism, and it can’t be replicated with AI — and I don’t see any of it at Inside Arlington. Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email. We are two longtime Arlington residents deeply concerned about the decline of local news and its detrimental effects on civic life and society. In 2023, we formed a non-profit, Nano Media, with the mission to revitalize local news in an economically sustainable way.

Inside Arlington is our pilot and flagship. Our initial focus is town governance. We use artificial intelligence (AI) to transcribe and recap committee meetings, which we post on this website and email as newsletters. Inside Arlington is a gateway to primary sources and a companion to information published by the town. Although no automated system is perfect, our testing has found the summaries accurately reflect the discussions. We invite you to listen to the official meetings and compare them – and to let us know if you find an error.

Our posts are records of what happens at meetings few people have time to attend, a tool for residents and journalists alike. We are a source and a resource, trying to fill a void with searchable texts about everyday governance. We could not do this without the dedicated staff and volunteers of Arlington Community Media Inc (ACMi), the town’s official access channel, who attend, record and post the meetings on YouTube. This is just the beginning. We need your feedback to improve and evolve Inside Arlington. In the future, we want to help other towns create their own web sites like this and help small news outlets use these tools to augment their reporting.

Email us at info@insidearlington.org. Startups in Arlington, Marblehead, and the South Shore have cropped up in recent years with the same mission: utilize artificial intelligence to help cover local government and keep residents informed at a time when... Far from taking reporters’ jobs, these efforts seek to add something — anything — to the civic conversation in communities that have seen their local newspapers and broadcast stations collapse. But the organizers of some of the projects say they face a huge obstacle: trust from the audiences they hope to help. It’s early days for AI-assisted journalism, and some efforts are just getting off the ground. Others have already pulled the plug, however, citing a lack of interest and engagement.

When Winston Chen and David Trilling of Inside Arlington stopped publishing AI summaries of local meetings last year, they only had about 100 subscribers, little to no feedback from readers, and rejections from almost... “To be honest, it was a little frustrating,” Trilling, a former journalist, said. “We’re not asking for any money [for] this service that we think could really improve civic engagement in this town of 45,000 people, and there just didn’t seem to be much interest.” <iframe width="100%" height="124" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="https://player.wbur.org/radioboston/2023/10/05/arlington-local-news-chatgpt-ai"></iframe> Could artificial intelligence soon bring you your local news? That's what happening in Arlington, where a startup has designed a news website run by the AI program ChatGPT to serve a city the company says is a news desert.

Hiawatha Bray joins Radio Boston for the latest edition of Tech Talk to discuss the reliability of AI-generated news and what it means for the future of journalism.

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