Local News

AI-assisted reporting in Boston-area newsrooms raises questions about role of new technology in building a community

Several local news outlets have published articles by an “AI-assisted reporter,” prompting experts to reflect on journalism’s path forward.

Several local Gannett-owned newsrooms are using a generative AI tool for reporting. Jacquelyn Martin/AP

March 25, 2025

4 minutes to read

As newsrooms grapple with whether and how to integrate artificial intelligence, some publications in the Boston area have started using a generative AI tool to assist with their reporting.

The outlets are all owned by Gannett, which publishes USA Today along with hundreds of local outlets, including many in Massachusetts. Gannet publications in the area include The Patriot Ledger, the Cape Cod Times, The MetroWest Daily News, and Wicked Local.

These newsrooms are now implementing Espresso, an AI tool which helps reporters “draft polished articles from community announcements,” according to Dan O’Brien, an editor at the MetroWest Daily News. The tool is generative, meaning that it uses patterns in existing content to create new content.

Beth McDermott, identified on her staff page as an “AI-assisted reporter,” is the author behind numerous articles across many of these publications.

These articles typically consist of rewritten press releases and community announcements which cover local businesses and organizations, O’Brien wrote in the MetroWest Daily News March 10. Some of the community groups covered include high schools, city and town governments, and local restaurateurs.

“Beth is part of a new initiative to bring local announcements and events to the public,” O’Brien wrote. “We’re using technology to make it easier and quicker for Beth to publish the community announcements that matter to you while also freeing up our full-time multimedia journalists to focus on enterprising news coverage.”

Gannett maintains that this use of AI will boost efficiency in newsrooms without coming at a cost to their journalistic integrity.

“By leveraging AI, we are able to expand coverage and enable our journalists to focus on more in-depth reporting,” a USA Today spokesperson said in a 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.”

Gannett did not specify which individual newsrooms are publishing AI-assisted content, but said in a statement that the company has “embraced the use of AI across the USA TODAY Network.”

A lack of information in McDermott’s staff bio, which only includes a link to a page of ethical guidelines, has raised concerns about her role.

“I would like to know more specifically about the process,” said Dan Kennedy, a professor in the School of Journalism at Northeastern University. “What exactly is she doing, and what exactly is AI doing? It doesn’t seem like they are telling us that.”

McDermott’s articles all feature a similar message at the bottom, indicating that “journalists were involved in every step of the information gathering, review, editing and publishing process.”

The messages don’t specify which parts of the process are being completed by human reporters and which are done by Espresso. For local news in particular, this could make it harder for newsrooms to foster community, Kennedy said.

“I think that people who are enthusiastic about using AI to cover local news are missing half the picture because local news is not just about reporting news and information,” Kennedy said. “It’s also an important part of creating a civic conversation and helping to reimagine and respark community life, and you can’t do that without people.”

Even so, Kennedy sees the value in tools like Otter.ai, which uses AI and machine learning to convert speech to text, making it a common choice for journalists looking to speed up the interview transcription process.

“In terms of trying to make sense of data for certain types of investigative reporting, [Otter.ai] has been the holy grail in a lot of newsrooms for a long time,” Kennedy said.

John Wihbey, an assistant professor of journalism and media innovation at Northeastern University, is more optimistic about implementing AI, particularly for the more tedious parts of journalism. By embracing AI in the newsroom, he said, journalists can dramatically boost their efficiency by handing off more menial newsroom tasks, such as transcription, to these tools.

“I think there’s a real potential of reinvigorating investigative journalism, which is sorely needed,” Wihbey said. “I also think if generative AI can create efficiencies that free journalists up to do more investigative journalism, that’s also a net plus.”

In addition to these time-saving benefits, implementing AI tools in one form or another has the potential to reach wider audiences, as Tomás Dodds, an assistant professor in journalism and news media at Leiden University in the Netherlands, noted.

“It might be able to allow people who don’t speak English as a first language, like me, to perhaps access publics and audiences that speak English or newsrooms that speak English,” Dodds said. “And so, their stories don’t have to be limited just to their particular regions but actually can travel across the world.”

Dodds is also a researcher at the AI, Media, and Democracy Lab, which aims to examine “the impact of AI on the democratic function of the media.” Considering AI’s applications both in the newsroom and in academia, he has ideas of his own about how journalists can stay informed.

“The first thing that we need to do with newsrooms is create these knowledge-sharing initiatives where, both from academia but also other newsrooms, [people] are able to share knowledge and expertise with these newsrooms, helping them, for example, to create their own guidelines.”

Journalists are best off accepting that AI will inevitably play a role in their field as the technology continues to develop, Dodds said. As Dodds observed, AI has already been gradually integrated in newsrooms for more than a decade. Rather than resisting it, journalists should be prepared to work with it in a way that improves efficiency in the newsroom.

“Artificial intelligence is here to stay in journalism, and it’s going to get more and more embedded in newsrooms,” Dodds said. “We need to acknowledge that it’s going to be here from now on.”