AI didn’t kill Local News. Could it actually save it?

The Copilot — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:43:00 +0000

For many journalists and publishers, artificial intelligence feels like the next existential threat…a technology capable of flooding the internet with cheap content, eroding trust, disrupting search, and making it even harder for real journalism to survive.

But what if AI could also be part of the solution?

On this episode of The Media Copilot, host Pete Pachal sits down with Paul Gewuerz, host of Small Press, Big Ideas and founder of LocalPod, to explore what is actually happening on the front lines of local media.

After more than 120 conversations with publishers, editors, entrepreneurs, and local news operators, Paul has seen firsthand how deeply challenged the industry remains. But he has also discovered something that rarely makes the headlines: new ideas are taking root.

From local newspapers transforming themselves into cafés and community gathering spaces to publishers building new revenue streams, launching podcasts, embracing events, and using AI to accomplish work that once required entire teams, local journalism is being reinvented in unexpected ways.

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Pete and Paul discuss why trust may become even more valuable in an internet overwhelmed by AI-generated content, how small newsrooms are already using tools like ChatGPT and Otter.ai, and why AI could give independent publishers the ability to launch products and businesses that simply weren’t possible before.

They also confront the darker side of this transformation, including AI slop, fake local news sites, politically funded “pink slime” operations, and the growing challenge of knowing what information…and which sources…can actually be trusted.

In this episode:

Why local journalism remains vital to healthy communities and democracy
How innovative publishers are reinventing the local news business model
Why trust could become journalism’s greatest advantage in the age of AI
How small newsrooms are actually using AI today
The opportunities AI creates for new products, revenue streams, and branded content
Why AI-generated local news and “pink slime” sites pose a growing threat
How podcasts can help local publishers grow audiences and deepen community relationships
Why Paul believes AI represents a new industrial revolution
The uncomfortable reality of building with AI: if you can create something faster, so can everyone else

Why this matters

For Paul, the promise of AI is personal. After spending more than two years building a software platform with limited progress, he used AI-assisted coding tools to complete it in just two months.

“I’ve been working on a software platform for my company for two and a half years, had about 10% done. I have finished it in the last two months. It is operational. People are on the platform.”

His experience raises one of the biggest questions facing media today:

What happens when suddenly anyone can build almost anything?

About the 👤 Guest

Paul Gewuerz on LinkedIn: Paul Gewuerz

LocalPod website: LocalPod.co

Small Press, Big Ideas on LinkedIn: Small Press, Big Ideas

About the show:

To explore more conversations like this and see what’s new, visit the Media Copilot website at mediacopilot.ai. You’ll find new episodes, expanded resources, and tools designed for journalists, communicators, and media leaders navigating the fast-changing world of AI. It’s the home base for everything Media Copilot and it’s just getting started.

Enjoyed this episode?

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Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso
Edited by the Musso Media Team

Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0

Episode Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Introduction

Pete Pachal (00:34)

Hi, welcome to The Media Copilot. It’s a podcast about how AI is changing media, news, and communication. I’m your host, Pete Pachal. I covered tech for a long time as a journalist, and now I have deep conversations with the media people, the builders, and the creators who are all answering the question: How will we get information in the future? And how will that transform journalism and the business of media?

My guest today is Paul Gewuerz, host of Small Press, Big Ideas. That’s a podcast about local news in the United States and the people trying to make it work. Paul talks to publishers, editors, entrepreneurs, and local news operators about what’s working, what isn’t, and the future of community journalism.

I was recently a guest on Paul’s show, and we had a lively conversation about AI and local news and search and trust and all the things. So I wanted to flip the microphone this time and get his view from the front lines of local media.

Local news really is where a lot of the AI debate gets very real. These organizations are usually understaffed and underfunded, but they’re deeply tied to their communities. AI could potentially help them cover more ground, build more products, reach new audiences, and save time. But it could also flood the zone with cheap content and make trust even harder.

So we’re going to talk about what Paul’s hearing from small publishers and how local newsrooms are actually using AI. Where’s the risk? Where’s the opportunity? And what does community journalism look like if AI becomes part of the basic infrastructure of media?

Before we get into it, please take a second to rate or review the show. It really would help a lot. If you’re listening on Apple or Spotify, that might mean leaving a five-star review and maybe a nice comment. And if you’re watching on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe to the channel. Those things really do help people find the show.

All right. Housekeeping over. Paul, welcome to The Media Copilot.

Paul Gewuerz (02:46)

Pete, thanks, man. Thanks for having me on. Good to talk to you again. It’s been a few months, or a few lifetimes in the AI world and media world. So yeah, good to be here.

Pete Pachal (02:49)

Yeah, likewise, man. Totally. I think it’s like 500 Claude versions ago.

Before we get into AI and all the stuff around community journalism and local news that I just talked about, let’s talk a little bit about you. I’d love to hear more about your history, your background, and what brought you to covering local media in this way.

From Audiobooks to Local Journalism

Paul Gewuerz (03:20)

Yeah, I’d love to. I’ve said it a million times on my podcast: I’m not a journalist. I don’t come from a journalism background. I’ve always had an interest in it. In high school, I was really attracted to more gonzo journalism. I was a big fan of Hunter S. Thompson.

I went to school for journalism for a few years and graduated in 2008, so not a great time for the job market. I went into an entirely different field. I actually worked for a beer distributor for about a decade.

Pete Pachal (03:58)

Okay. I feel like that would have been great in 2008, with everyone wanting to drink their sorrows away.

Paul Gewuerz (04:18)

It was great. The beer industry does good in a good economy and better in a bad one. That’s kind of the internal line, anyway.

I worked there at a big corporation, a household name, for a long time and eventually got frustrated with the large corporate structures.

I’ve been told that I have a good voice, so I actually got into narrating audiobooks. I did that freelance for a few years, left my corporate gig, and eventually got out of that freelance, feast-or-famine mindset.

I’m a big audio guy, so I started producing podcasts for clients, social media influencers, content creators, etc.

A few years back, I was approached by a local news outlet in the Seattle area to produce a podcast for them, and it reignited that interest in journalism, specifically local journalism. We put together a podcast for them, and I got really interested in it. I wanted to work more in the space, started reaching out to more publishers, launched my own podcast, Small Press, Big Ideas, and I’ve just tumbled down a rabbit hole of media and specifically local journalism.

I’ve had a crash course in it over the last few years. I went into it initially as a business interest. I thought, “This is an interesting niche to target.” Then, after talking to people, I realized how vital it is to democracy and a community.

There are studies showing that when a local news source disappears in an area, creating what’s referred to as a news desert, corruption and financial misdealings at the city and county level skyrocket because there’s no accountability.

So besides the need for good-quality local news and information, it’s a vital thing for our society. I didn’t expect to tumble down that rabbit hole, but that’s where I’m at.

Today, I host the Small Press, Big Ideas podcast, and I have a company called LocalPod.co, where we specialize in producing podcasts for mostly all-digital publishers. But specifically, my heart is with local media operators and helping them grow audience and revenue from there.

That’s pretty much the story in a nutshell, I’d say.

The Untold Stories of Local Media

Pete Pachal (06:15)

I feel like with local media, there are obviously networks and groups that cover certain regions and that sort of thing. But generally, I don’t know if there’s a lot of communication outside of those things.

I feel like your podcast really provides a good service by creating conversation around that layer of media.

Everyone talks about local media almost at arm’s length, in the third person. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had more?” But I feel like the actual newspapers are rarely part of that discussion. It’s usually just people opining on them, or whatever they are, not necessarily newspapers.

I think you’re providing a valuable service by giving folks an outlet. Also, people love to talk about their communities and themselves, and as you’ve found, I’m sure there are tons of unique stories out there in terms of success in journalism.

Paul Gewuerz (07:20)

Yeah, it’s a bigger topic than I realized. When I started the podcast, I thought maybe I could get 10 people I’d researched to come on. I’m 120 episodes deep now and still have people lined up. There are a lot of interesting stories out there.

I had Steven Waldman on the podcast early on from Rebuild Local News, an advocacy group out of Washington focused on strengthening local news. I think he’s the one who put it best in terms of local media sustainability.

He said it’s like there’s a forest fire. The last 20 years of Google and Meta and everything else have decimated the local media industry. But there are all these little green shoots and sprouts coming up. You wouldn’t know it from looking at the side of a mountain, but if you look closely, they’re there.

That’s what the podcast has shown me. There are a lot of cool stories and innovations happening. It’s just not necessarily at the scale we need yet.

Pete Pachal (08:16)

I’d love to hear about some of those. Are you thinking about anything specific when you think about the promising things being seeded right now?

Paul Gewuerz (08:22)

I’ve had a lot of people on the show, and every organization is different. Every community is different, and this is a huge country. The podcast is mostly based in the U.S., although we’ve had a couple of people from the U.K. and Canada.

I’ve had nonprofits on. I had somebody from South Carolina who left the legacy newspaper in town and started basically a glorified Substack. Three or four years later, they’re a nonprofit that works mostly on sponsorships, and I think they have a newsroom of four or five, maybe five or six, full-time people now. It’s become this vital thing to the community.

For a Canadian example, The Green Line up in Toronto is really interesting. It was founded by Anita Li, who was also on the podcast. I really like the design. They’ve built The Green Line to be very social media-native. Everything is visually appealing. Even the functionality of the website is different from what you think of when you imagine a newspaper site.

They create in-depth guides on things like housing and the job market, and they’re very practical. It’s not just an article you’d read. It’s a different format, and they’re crushing it.

Those two come to mind, but I could go on and on. There are a lot of examples.

The Hard Reality of Running Local News

Pete Pachal (10:04)

I’m glad you brought up Anita Li’s operation. I actually used to work with her at Mashable. She’s great.

We’ve talked about some specific examples, but let’s zoom out a bit. What’s your broader perspective on local media now that you’ve talked to more than 120 people and heard so many stories? What do you understand about local news now that you didn’t when you started the show?

Paul Gewuerz (10:36)

You hit the nail on the head when you said everybody holds it at arm’s length and says, “Yeah, we need more good local journalism.” And almost everybody who says that also says, “Well, I’m not going to pay for it.”

That’s a reality.

I think it was a mistake made by the news media industry early on in the internet era to put everything up for free. People got used to that, and it’s very hard to walk it back.

Pete Pachal (10:57)

And we’re reaping the winds of that with AI now that you think about it. But anyway, go on.

Paul Gewuerz (11:05)

Not that anybody knew that at the time. I don’t want to discredit anybody.

But what I’ve seen is that it’s a hard business to operate, especially where it’s needed most in rural America. I’m in western Colorado, in a town of 20,000, which is the biggest city anywhere around my region. I think a lot of folks on the coasts forget just how huge the country is.

It’s a very difficult business to operate on a smaller scale where it’s needed. If we’re using jiu-jitsu belt levels, it’s closer to the black belt level of business operations compared with something that has higher margins.

Combine that with the fact that many of the people who get into smaller outlets are mission-driven journalists. They want to serve the community. They’re not necessarily businesspeople.

You came up in media. There used to be a firewall between the business side and the editorial side. A lot of that needs to be dissolved, and people on either side need to think more like the other side.

Business operators sometimes come in and don’t know how to do good journalism. On the other hand, there are people whose organizations have fallen apart around them, and maybe they’re the last person left, a one-man or one-woman operation running the whole thing. They have to report on everything and get revenue coming in the door.

It’s a challenge. It’s a very, very complicated challenge. I think about it a lot every day, and I don’t have any great answers. But there are also amazing people doing amazing things out there.

Why Local Media Must Reinvent Itself

Pete Pachal (12:50)

For sure. The smaller the organization, the more everyone has to be mindful of how the business is doing and how you’re actually succeeding.

Neither of us means to disparage the spirit of the church-state separation, which has good roots in preventing business interests from affecting journalism. We both believe in that.

But at the same time, there has to be a strategy for running the business. If you’re News Corp, you might have strategists and executives making broader strategic decisions. But if you’re a team of three, four, or five people, everything is strategic to some extent.

I’m not at all endorsing commercial interests affecting the actual journalism, but when it comes to the broader directions you take, everyone is going to have a voice. Especially today, almost every decision seems a bit existential.

Paul Gewuerz (14:25)

Yes, very much.

The way I think about it sometimes is that the local news industry has gone the way of the music industry.

The big record companies in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s were absolutely printing money with records, cassettes, and CDs. Then the internet came along and democratized everything. Napster and LimeWire arrived, disrupted the business model, and now it’s a very different, much smaller business that’s much more spread out.

I think the same thing has happened with news.

Newspapers had this amazing business model throughout the 1900s. They had classified ads and were the primary source of advertising revenue. Then the internet came along, along with Google and Craigslist, and upended that.

It’s never going back to the way it was. Things evolve. They’re constantly in flux. It’s going to change, and it’s a matter of learning how to deal with that and adapt to the new realities and the new environment.

Pete Pachal (15:58)

The music analogy is interesting because the music industry was forced to figure out that selling songs for 99 cents, at least in the 2000s, was kind of the future. Then they had to adapt to this new business model, and it’s interesting that it was forced upon them by tech.

There are a lot of parallels here. I wonder about the media and strategic planning back then. Classified revenue was substantial, and then it went to zero. If they had planned around that, could it have made a difference?

Because in today’s media, specifically with AI, there’s a lot of strategic planning around Google Zero. It hasn’t happened yet. Obviously, Google isn’t dead as a search engine, and the 10 blue links still exist, at least for a while. But people have been planning around Google Zero for a while.

If people had started planning around classified zero in 2000, would there have been quite the apocalypse there was? I don’t know.

At this point in 2026, media has learned so many hard lessons over the last couple of decades that we’ve got this ingrained survival instinct now.

Are you seeing evidence of that at the local level? How are they surviving?

Trust, Community, and New Business Models

Paul Gewuerz (17:30)

To be honest, there are a lot of organizations that, in my opinion, have not changed enough. They’re still relying on advertising and sponsors, scraping by, and doing what they’ve always done.

But the ones that are thriving are doing something unique. They’re building a local brand.

You came on my podcast and talked about how you think it’s going to be a huge boon for PR firms over the next couple of years. Anybody who can generate trust and reliability in an age when anyone can produce anything with AI has an opportunity.

If you can build a brand, get people excited, and generate that trust in a community, those are the organizations doing a really good job.

I thought of a few more examples. There’s the Big Bend Sentinel in Marfa, Texas.

Max Kabat, who came on the podcast, and his wife moved to Marfa. There was an elderly couple running the Big Bend Sentinel, the local newspaper and print shop, and they wanted to retire. Max and his wife purchased it from them.

There was a huge print shop in downtown Marfa, but they didn’t need that much space anymore because most everything is digital now, even though they still have a print product.

They basically cut the space in half. They turned half of this old, really cool print shop into a café, community space, event center, and arts center, with the profits feeding into the journalism.

It’s become an absolute hub. Marfa is a town of about 2,000 people, and I think the combined café, event space, and newspaper employ around eight or 10 full-time people now.

There’s a similar example up in Maine. They have a café and were featured on CBS Sunday Morning. There’s also a bed-and-breakfast tied to it, and upstairs is basically the newspaper.

It all feeds into this idea of a community center. People who want to air their grievances about the city council can come down, have pancakes, and talk to journalists.

There are cool things like that happening.

Pete Pachal (20:18)

Is that an opportunity for sponsorships and things like that? Having an event space…events are the future for media broadly. Obviously, it’s one of many business models, but it’s a growing one.

It sounds like this could be a doorway to that at the local level. You could have a sponsored night and do something related to your publication.

Paul Gewuerz (20:45)

Yeah. My friend Paul Myers is in California’s Central Valley, and they do what I think are called “Brews and News” nights every month or quarter.

They basically rent out the local microbrewery, and you get one free pint of beer. The price is your email address for their newsletter list.

It’s not necessarily a sponsored thing, but it’s about subscribers and growing the audience. I think it’s a cool idea.

How Local Newsrooms Are Actually Using AI

Pete Pachal (21:18)

That’s really cool.

So, Paul, we’re about 20 minutes in and we haven’t talked about AI yet. I feel like I’m getting someone in my ear insisting that I get to the machines.

You talked about some success stories. How much AI is actually being used at the local level, and what are some of the most interesting use cases you’ve come across?

Paul Gewuerz (21:57)

There are a couple of things that almost everyone who comes on the podcast mentions.

The specific tool that seemingly every journalist and entrepreneur running a local news operation mentions is Otter.ai, which is a transcription service. It seems simple and obvious, but everyone swears by Otter for transcribing meeting notes, interviews, city council meetings, etc.

Another trend I’ve seen is normal old ChatGPT being used for ideas. Almost nobody, I should say, is using it to actually write content, at least not unchecked. But using it to generate headline or title ideas seems to be very popular.

I’m an optimist. I’m a fan of AI. I think it can be used as a tool.

A lot of local news publishers are scarred from the rise of Google, the internet, Craigslist, and everything else we’ve talked about. These big tech companies came in and basically hollowed them out over the last 20 years.

I think a lot of them view AI as an extension of that: “This is going to be the final blow. This is it. This is going to do us in.”

I fundamentally disagree with that.

As opposed to The Empire Strikes Back, I think AI tools are Return of the Jedi. I think they’re going to enable so much more time for these organizations.

There are boring back-end business use cases and tasks nobody wants to do but that need to get done. AI can reduce newsroom time spent on those things and enable more good reporting to get done.

I also think there are business models that local media operators have tried in the past that are going to become more possible now. For instance, the idea of operating as a local news outlet and also as a marketing firm for local businesses.

Some people have had success doing marketing for local companies. But that’s almost like adding a whole other business to your newsroom.

Pete Pachal (24:37)

Can you double-click on the marketing part of that? Are you talking about a publication with a team that might also do branded work?

Paul Gewuerz (24:46)

Yes. It’s something that’s been floated around in the space for probably the last 10 years, with some success. But once again, it’s a hard business to run, and that adds another layer of complexity on top of everything else.

Pete Pachal (25:02)

That speaks to what I was saying earlier about the church-state separation. At a major publication, obviously you’re going to have different teams and completely different operations.

At the local level, you’re going to have to put on different hats and figure it out. That’s just the reality.

Paul Gewuerz (25:17)

Yeah. For example, I’m mostly a one-man show for my business, and I need to get a new landing page up for a segment of LocalPod.co.

A year or two ago, that would have taken three days or, if I’m being honest, a week of my time to get polished. I can do that in half a day now with some of these AI tools.

It’s hard to overstate how much more efficient AI has made me at operating my business. I think that’s going to translate to local media operators.

For the marketing example, I think they’ll be able to do their reporting and still have enough time to take on clients, like the real estate brokerage in town that wants branded work done, while also getting a spot in the newspaper that week.

I think it’s going to create more options. We don’t know exactly what it’s going to enable, but I’m seeing it in my own business and my own tinkering with these tools.

There are all kinds of things possible now that I simply didn’t have the time or bandwidth to take on before.

What Can We Do Now That We Couldn’t Do Before?

Pete Pachal (26:26)

I like that. It’s making good on the promise that AI isn’t just about efficiencies. It’s not just making you a little faster, or even a lot faster, and hopefully getting time back.

It’s also about asking: What can we do now that we simply couldn’t do before?

Branded content isn’t reinventing the wheel, but for these publications where, as I said, everything is existential, that’s a big move. Now they don’t necessarily need to hire a completely different team and buy a whole different set of software to do it.

That feels like progress to me.

What also resonated with me is that a lot of the distrust of AI stems from its effect on distribution. AI is obviously vastly affecting distribution and digital discovery. That’s indisputable. But its use as a tool is also indisputable.

You can acknowledge how good it is at making certain things better in your workflows while also acknowledging that, yes, it’s doing something strange to audiences as people get AI summaries and stop there.

Broadly, it’s a “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” argument. But I feel like that’s where journalists often end up for some reason.

Are you seeing that change as AI becomes more embedded? On my end, over the last five or six months, I’m seeing more of a resignation among skeptics that this is happening.

Paul Gewuerz (28:23)

I’ve felt the exact same way.

A year ago, if I’d seen some AI headline in the local news industry about somebody using it for something, there would have been a ton of backlash, shaming, and people piling on.

But over the last five or six months, I’ve seen a marked shift in the mood of the industry.

Whether people are resigning themselves to it or just getting more familiar with AI, realizing what it can and can’t do, and becoming more aware of it, the mood has changed.

The vibe has shifted, Pete, from what I can tell.

Could AI Actually Strengthen Local News?

Pete Pachal (29:01)

Yeah. Not completely to, “Hey, it’s awesome,” but more to, “Okay, this is getting embedded.”

Let’s talk about AI disintermediation and distribution. Do you have a sense of the unique factors affecting local media?

Intuitively, I would think local media might be a little less affected because you’re more invested in your own community and what’s happening there. You’d want to go directly to the source.

What are you hearing about how badly Google Zero or the traffic apocalypse is affecting local media?

Paul Gewuerz (29:50)

I think in terms of trust, it’s actually a really good thing for local news.

People are inundated with content coming at them now. If there is a trusted local voice, I think people are going to turn to that more and more. There’s that human connection, a human byline they can actually read.

That being said, local media operators still need to pull that off. It goes back to what I was talking about before: brand building and trust building.

Not everybody has that down.

A lot of people I talk to honestly think they can keep doing what they’ve always done. “We’ve got our website up. We’ve had our masthead for 50 years. People trust that.”

It’s just not the case anymore.

You still need to be on social. You need to be everywhere at the same time.

It’s a dance between the people who don’t want to change and the people who are changing. The people who get it and recognize the opportunity realize that I think it’s going to be a good thing.

Because the AI slop out there is ridiculous.

AI Slop, Fake Local News, and “Pink Slime”

Pete Pachal (31:08)

Let’s talk about slop specifically for local media.

Every few months, it feels like there’s some kind of story about someone trying to game the system with local news.

There was a guy who was eventually hired by 6AM City. That wasn’t necessarily malicious. I think there was a mix of people trying things out who aren’t really journalists and are just throwing locally oriented content out there.

Then there’s this more recent thing in Florida involving a sort of fake site, which sounds a little shadier, and they were apparently running a whole bunch of other sites.

I feel like this keeps happening in local media. Maybe it’s because people think they can do something with local sites and stay under the radar, as opposed to trying to create some fake national site that probably wouldn’t get very far.

Is that basically what’s happening, or is there some unique perfect storm of circumstances fueling this?

Paul Gewuerz (32:31)

I think that’s definitely a thing. You see those headlines pop up.

I think it’s two different things.

One is more malicious, like the story in Florida. It’s referred to as “pink slime.”

Pink slime sites are basically websites that look like legitimate news operations but are funded by some kind of organization with a specific goal, usually political operatives or something like that.

They’re playing themselves off as reliable local journalism and then slandering one political party or the other party’s candidates.

So that’s happening, often with strange funding that nobody can really trace.

At the same time, there’s been a huge trend I’ve seen on YouTube and some podcasts of people getting really interested in local newsletters specifically.

There have been some huge success stories where people say, “I run this local newsletter, and now I make $400,000 a year.”

That has happened, and there’s been a lot of interest and content popping up around it.

With the rise of AI tools making things easier, there are also a lot of people in their basements throwing spaghetti at the wall. Someone can spin up 15 local newsletters with almost nothing, ripping off actual local news outlets, copying their work, and putting it out there.

I think those are the two main culprits.

But there are also legitimate people creating local curated events newsletters. It’s not as simple as good and bad. There are quality people doing this work.

My friend TJ Larkin is in that space, and he puts out a really quality product and teaches other people how to do it.

Podcasting as a Growth Strategy for Local News

Pete Pachal (34:29)

Absolutely. Let’s switch gears as we wrap up here because we’re both podcasters, and you’ve obviously talked and written about podcasting and its relevance to local media.

Where does podcasting factor into a local news strategy? Obviously, people like podcasts, but they’re harder to scale. Is that less true now?

What’s a good podcast growth strategy for local news in 2026?

Paul Gewuerz (35:02)

That’s one of the reasons I zoned in on this a few years ago.

Podcasts are notoriously hard to reliably grow. And when they do grow, it’s almost hard to figure out why unless there’s some kind of viral moment.

If you start a podcast about World War II in the Pacific Theater, for example, it’s hard to find audiences. It’s hard to find first-party data.

The difference I’ve seen with local podcasts in particular, although this does take a little bit of a budget, is a site I use called AudioGO.

It’s an advertising platform that allows you to create 15- and 30-second audio ads and place them on top podcast networks, Pandora, and a few other platforms.

The key is that you can geotarget them by ZIP code.

I’ve seen some success with this, and it’s particularly useful for local podcasts.

If you can communicate your message well in a 30-second spot, something like, “Hey, this is the Montrose Daily Press podcast covering the news and events in your town,” you can geotarget that to people listening to The Daily or top true crime podcasts in your local area.

I haven’t seen anything else work as well as that kind of strategy for general podcasting.

Your podcast and my podcast don’t work like that. You’re covering AI, I’m covering local media, but we’re both speaking to the whole country. It’s harder to target those people.

That’s the edge I’ve seen. Any local operators listening should feel free to use that. That’s kind of the secret sauce we’ve been using.

What Keeps Paul Up at Night About AI?

Pete Pachal (37:00)

I’m sure everyone’s got their notebooks out right now.

I try to end these conversations with a similar question because we see divergent futures ahead of us with AI involved. There’s going to be bad, and there’s going to be good.

What is something that might keep you up at night with regard to AI and media? And what’s something you’re hopeful about?

Paul Gewuerz (37:29)

Something that keeps me up at night is the relentless pace of change.

It’s really hard for me to see what anything is going to look like in two or three years, let alone six months from now.

I’ve been over the moon with some of the capabilities I have now, like with Claude Code. I’ve been working on a software platform for my company for two and a half years and had about 10% done.

I finished it in the last two months.

It’s operational. People are on the platform.

Pete Pachal (38:00)

Nice. What’s the platform? Tell me about it.

Paul Gewuerz (38:03)

It’s my LocalPod Studio. It’s basically a dashboard studio where you can turn written content into an AI-narrated podcast that’s fully distributed in a couple of clicks.

Anybody who wants to check that out can go to LocalPod.co or message me.

But the thing that keeps me up at night is that I built this…

Pete Pachal (38:18)

Nice. Beautiful.

Paul Gewuerz (38:28)

It’s pretty incredible.

I have a little bit of coding ability, but not much. Minor league. And I’ve been able to build this crazy thing, and I have all these other ideas I can build.

But at the same time, I’m thinking: That means anybody can build this.

I think it’s a great equalizer and a great democratizing force. I’m excited and optimistic that I can build things and do things for my business.

The competition is going to come with that. I think it’s still early.

Combine all that with the fact that I don’t know what the whole economy is going to look like in a couple of years because you can’t map what that growth is going to look like.

I’m sorry, what was the second part of the question?

Pete Pachal (39:08)

You kind of almost mixed it in there, but it was also: What are you hopeful about?

Paul Gewuerz (39:25)

It’s really kind of the same thing.

There are doomers. There’s a lot of doomerism around AI. I don’t think AI is sentient. I don’t think it’s going to get there.

When you actually dig in and see how it works, it’s a very powerful tool. I don’t think it’s going to murder all of us. I just don’t see it in the cards. Or there’s a very small chance, at least.

Pete Pachal (39:36)

Yeah, people can tell it to do bad things, but it doesn’t have any ideas of its own.

Paul Gewuerz (39:39)

Yes. There’s no ghost in the machine, is my take on it.

I think this is a new industrial revolution. I don’t think that’s underselling it at all.

People are worried about all the jobs disappearing. But every time people have said that in recorded history, if you go back and read about it, new things emerge that people couldn’t even imagine becoming jobs.

I graduated high school in 2003. I’m 41 years old.

My job titles today include podcast producer and SaaS platform owner. My wife and I also operate an Airbnb upstairs.

None of that existed when I graduated high school in 2003.

If I’d said I was an Airbnb host and podcast producer, I would have been locked up, basically. And that was only a little over two decades ago.

Things change.

I think there’s a future of abundance, and I think AI is going to help us unlock that. There are some issues with it, but I think they’re going to get sorted out because it’s worth it to sort them out.

Pete Pachal (40:50)

That’s awesome. We’ll leave it there.

Paul, thank you so much for dropping by The Media Copilot and sharing your thoughts.

Paul Gewuerz (40:55)

Yeah, this was fun, Pete. I always enjoy these talks. It gets me fired up. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Pete Pachal (41:01)

Cool. We’ll do it again soon.

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