Nieman Foundation at Harvard
AI-generated local news has finally arrived. That is, it has arrived in Northwest Arkansas.
OkayNWA, which plays on the acronym for the Ozarks region that includes Bentonville, Fayetteville and Springdale, first launched as an app last year. In recent months, it’s found a new batch of readers through its revamped website and social accounts on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. Its tagline: “Feel the pulse of Northwest Arkansas.”
OkayNWA calls itself a news site. “AI-powered news” leads its title on Google search results and the about page claims the site has “embraced the cutting-edge potential of artificial intelligence to redefine how news is sourced, reported, and presented to you.”
In practice, OkayNWA reads closer to a local events aggregator, with some added zhuzh. “Salsa Beats and Sensual Moves Light Up Sunday Nights at Six Twelve Coffee House,” reads one recent nightlife headline. “2024 NWA Health Summit Sparks Crucial Dialogue on Maternal Health,” reads one of the site’s more serious entries. “The Heat of Competition Meets the Complexity of Affection in Challengers,” reads a recent glowing review of the Zendaya blockbuster vehicle. The articles rarely top 400 words and, with few exceptions, are promoting an upcoming event or recapping a recent one. The blurbs are accompanied by a cartoonish, DALL-E-generated imagining of the event.
Each story on the site is bylined by an AI avatar. Together the avatars form a ragtag newsroom of faux beat reporters. “Arlo Artiste” is apparently on the pulse of the arts and culture scene in Northwest Arkansas, “Miles Rythmic” is the designated music critic, and “Sammy Streets” is your bootstrap “street-level reporter.” They are each visualized as a literal robot, most with a microphone in hand. “Each AI reporter brings its own flair and perspective to the articles and images it creates, making our news site uniquely dynamic and diverse,” reads OkayNWA’s about page. On closer inspection, however, it’s clear the avatars “Cultural Carrie” and “Wendy Weather” are little more than article tags that filter the AI-generated stories into topic categories.
The most recent feature on the OkayNWA app is the “Morning Report.” An AI-generated audio clip appears at the top of the homepage daily and summarizes the upcoming events in a minute or less. Senior events correspondent “Eva Eventful” has been tapped to play radio jockey (in reality, it’s a synthetic voice from AI audio developer, Eleven Labs).
I found OkayNWA on a tip from a journalist in Bentonville, and on first pass I assumed the worst. AI-generated local news has earned deserved cynicism. The number of partisan “pink slime” sites across the U.S. recently surpassed the local daily newspapers they are mimicking; local news wire franchises like Hoodline have fabricated writers of color profiles to byline their AI-generated stories, and the aggregator Newsbreak recently began hallucinating crime stories, including a fake Christmas day shooting in Bridgeton, New Jersey.
Jay Price moved to Bentonville over a year ago. His company NWA Apps, which builds websites and apps for clients, is based out of a coworking space downtown. It’s just him, plus a few part-time employees.
“I moved not knowing nobody. I would always just try to find events, like networking events, and I’m a live music junkie, and was looking for group rides for mountain biking,” Price told me over the phone. “I was trying to figure out what to do here and there was information spread all over the place, whether it be Facebook, Instagram, various event aggregator sites and email lists.”
OkayNWA was a side project, on top of his contract work, and an excuse to play around with new generative AI tools and models as they hit the market. It was also a way to centralize the information he was struggling to find, scattered across the internet.
Price currently makes almost no direct revenue from OkayNWA. He often runs at a loss, due to small server fees plus his monthly OpenAI bill for using GPT, DALL-E, and other AI models owned by the AI behemoth. The only earnings come through merch he sells online emblazoned with the OkayNWA logo, including branded ping pong balls, tumblers, and tees. He has plans to launch a Shopify store soon.
Price doesn’t actively collect any analytics, or user data — he even stopped checking the OkayNWA app downloads after they crossed the several thousand threshold.
That doesn’t mean OkayNWA doesn’t have reach. “I had just moved here and then next thing you know, every DJ in town knew who I was and was hitting me up on Instagram,” said Price, who obliged by feeding their DJ nights into OkayNWA’s content generation system. He’s also begun setting up tents at fairs in Bentonville, handing out OkayNWA bags and using the app’s popularity as marketing to publicize his website and app-building services. At one street fair a couple approached Price’s tent, excited to meet the man behind the site. They’d only found out about the fair from OkayNWA earlier that day.
There’s ingenuity behind the bare bones site. At least 14 different bots are running simultaneously, scraping various segments of the internet, to pull together OkayNWA’s content each day, according to Price. One is an Instagram bot that crawls the accounts of local event venues, including bars, and concert halls, every night, to look for new posts and analyze whether they are publicizing a new event.
Initially, the bot hit a roadblock, since event flyers on Instagram usually include key pieces of information in images, and not in easily machine-readable text captions or comments. But Price began using OpenAI’s Vision, a model that can answer text prompts about what is present in an image, to decipher the event posters and pull out the relevant facts.
Price claims OkayNWA used to pull from other event aggregator sites in Arkansas, but they ended up writing up each other’s events in an endless copycat feedback loop. Now, he makes a point to try and pull directly from the source, like venue websites and calendars. He denies that the site scrapes proper local news publications in the area for content.
Each morning, Price wakes up and sorts through dozens of drafted new posts for the day, cutting the spam and green lighting the best of the crop. It’s almost the work of an editor — that is, minus the commissioning, editing, and production of each story. Price clarifies he doesn’t actually read the copy before publishing: “It’s assumed that the bot did, okay. It’s not gonna write vulgar stuff or anything like that.”
Rather than diving into the CMS to do line edits, Price uses an automation that verifies whether a post has each key piece of information for an event, like date, time, and location. He’ll kill the posts that don’t, as well as those that veer too far into heavier news topics.
“The articles should only be about events and fun and good times. I don’t want crime or politics, or even city council stuff,” he said. “It’ll grab some of those and think, oh, city council meeting, that’s an event. I’m just like, delete, delete, delete.”
“I was seeing the bots pick up news as events, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it, honestly. Like, a new bar is opening this Friday. Yeah that’s an event, but it’s also kind of news,” said Price. It’s a tension he hasn’t quite reconciled, but he’s exploring what the site could be with articles that are not solely about event promotion, including recent articles on hometown heroes at the Paris Olympics.
Despite crashing the local journalism scene with event coverage automatons, Price says he hasn’t received much pushback yet. “As long as AI use is disclosed — which it very much is for OkayNWA — I think folks can make their own decisions about whether to engage or not,” said Sam Hoisington, the founder and editor of The Bentonville Bulletin, an independent local news site launched by the NWA-native in April. “Some people might not like it, some people might love it.”
The Bulletin publishes its own weekly event roundups, but Hoisington doesn’t consider OkayNWA competition or worry about it siphoning off traffic. “We spend most of our time producing original local news updates,” he said, drawing a clear distinction between their sites.
Despite its lack of basic fact checking and often stilted copy, I can’t help but see OkayNWA as a harbinger of what automation may look like in local news. Whether it should or not, it’s a model that could be replicated community by community. Honestly, I’m surprised I haven’t seen it yet. Some have already approached Price asking for API access, and other sites in the area have asked for an embeddable OkayNWA-branded calendar.
Though its promise to readers is to innovate news coverage, Price admits at its core OkayNWA is basically a content management system. “I could open this up so that anybody within any city could create an account, start adding the locations,” he admits. “It’s built in such a way that it could potentially handle multiple tenants.” Who’s to say the great folks of Little Rock or Springfield don’t want their own AI event coverage?
Apparently, I’m not the first to ask if he’s expanding. “Everyone I talked to about it just goes straight to, how are you going to monetize this thing? Like, I’m not,” said Price. “They look at me like I’m crazy.”
