Local news providers weighing AI use in the newsroom should think twice, according to a new survey from the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern.
“The Medill survey provides a warning to news leaders,” Stephanie Edgerly and Tim Franklin write in the report released this week. “Respondents showed clear distrust of AI in the news-gathering process. Discomfort with AI was widespread.”
Medill surveyed 1,223 adults in the Chicago area and found few respondents were comfortable with AI use for coverage prioritization, writing news stories, or generating images or video. About half of respondents were comfortable with AI use for editing spelling and grammar, while 22% were “very uncomfortable or uncomfortable” even with that application.
The researchers say the survey “can be taken as a microcosm for what is happening locally across the country.”
Two-thirds of respondents did not report any use of AI to find or consume local news in the past week; only 11% asked an AI chatbot a question about local news instead of using a search engine.
A few other tidbits from the report:
- The number of people who have supported a local news organization financially by subscribing, donating, or becoming a member dropped from 19% in 2024 to 14% in 2026. What’s more, this year six in 10 respondents (61%) said no one should pay for news. Those who do pay for news were more negative about the impact of AI on local news than those who don’t, including its potential to accelerate misinformation, cause errors, and take jobs from human journalists.
- The percentage of respondents using a search engine to find local news daily declined to 34% from 41% in 2024.
- While newspapers are now a “niche product” and broadcast and radio are hemorrhaging audiences, “newspapers are far ahead in the critical task of going where the audiences are,” Edgerly and Franklin write. Of people who say they get local news at least once a month from a newspaper, 47% got that news via the newspaper’s website, app, or email. On the other hand, among those getting local news from TV at least once a month, 62% watched the broadcast and only 15% went to the TV station’s website, app, or email. “This shows that local TV news still has a long way to go to fix its audience problem,” the researchers write.
Read more and find the full report here .
Photo of Chicago by Dulcey Lima.