How a local newsletter company is leveraging AI to cover hundreds of counties across the US

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What if you took Morning Brew's approach to newsletter writing and applied it to local news? That was the original idea behind 6AM City, a company that launched its first newsletter in Greenville, South Carolina in 2016 and gradually expanded into over a dozen cities.

For most of its history, 6AM City's approach was to hire a handful of editors in each city and then gradually build up an audience and advertiser base. But in the last year, it developed a playbook for using AI to launch newsletters in smaller, less populated areas, with the goal of eventually hiring human editors once those newsletters reached certain thresholds.

In a recent interview, co-founder Ryan Heafy explained how these AI newsletters actually work, where they get their information, and what guardrails the company has put in place to ensure quality control.