We’re coming up on three years since generative AI became publicly available in the shape of ChatGPT. Since then, we’ve read daily coverage and opinions on everything from the existential threat to the huge efficiency gains the new tech brings with it.

For the news industry, one of the biggest questions linked to generative AI is, of course, how it impacts trust — trust in online information and journalism specifically.

Here’s an example of what we are up against: The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) recently published the largest international study of its kind. Journalists working in 14 languages evaluated more than 3,000 responses from ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity and found AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time, including through factual inaccuracies and sourcing problems.

Meanwhile, people increasingly use AI to find information. According to Reuters Institute’s Generative AI and news report 2025, people who use AI weekly to seek information rose from 11% in 2024 to 24% this year. However, trust is low: 29% of respondents say they trust ChatGPT, while none of the other AI assistants get above a 20% trust rate.

In a parallel, there’s a different picture coming into focus in a specific segment of the news industry: local journalism. Local people trust local news publishers in particular. According to a recent OnePoll survey, 80% of UK adults say they trust the information they see in their local media (up from 73% in 2024). According to Pew Research Center, in 2024, 74% of Americans said they had some or a lot of trust in local news.

The opportunity for local journalism

From my viewpoint at United Robots and Innovate Local, I perceive there’s a renewed sense of mission and confidence emerging in local news. It’s as if the arrival of GenAI has thrown the local journalism opportunity into sharp relief, and local newsrooms are running with it.

Local journalism is about where people live and what matters in their daily lives. In that sense, local media has an opportunity that’s pretty unique: to connect with physical people and to produce journalism that positively impacts the community in which they live.

To do that, newsrooms need to make sure journalists have time away from their desks. As Jonathan Heawood wrote for the U.K.’s Public Interest News Foundation, “Local news needs to be demonstrably local. The more that reporters are visible in their communities, the more they will be trusted.”

From a local newsroom perspective, this is a problem AI and automation can help solve in two basic ways:

1. Using AI to surface local stories.

A lot of time can be saved in local newsrooms by using AI to go through data and documents from local councils and similar bodies. Not only does this make reporters’ research faster and more efficient, the insights can also surface stories that would never have come to light without the power of AI.

2. Generating automated stories.

Content generated using rules-based AI is published by local news sites across Scandinavia, the United States, and other places — some using United Robots’ automated content, some generating their own.

This automated content, based on specific data sets, includes hyper-local information on house sales or sports as well as news texts about extreme weather or natural hazards, which means the newsroom can provide instant information on developing situations to the public, even when staffing levels are low.

Local Norwegian media group Amedia combines in-house generated, automated hyper-local stories about house sales, for example, while providing tools for reporters to access local data to do their journalism.

Speaking at a local media conference last year, Amedia Director of News Markus Rask Jensen said, “I wouldn’t advise you to replace human interaction with automation because it’s not a substitute for journalism. What we do is make this data available through our newsroom tools, which helps reporters work more efficiently and find more stories and, as a consequence, enable them to do even more local journalism and meet even more people in the community.”

And that, of course, speaks to the purpose of AI and automation in local news — to free up reporters’ time to do what only humans can do: trusted journalism.

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