Patch is a hyperlocal publisher with a grand vision: be everywhere. Its newsletters have reached over a thousand US communities and, thanks to AI, that number ballooned to 30,000 in just a few months.

St. John, who has been leading Patch for over a decade, concedes that the AI newsletters don’t deliver as robust of a news experience as its human-curated products, but they do keep more people informed.

Is getting caught up enough? Not quite.

Nieman Lab covered what came before the big AI newsletters experiment—human curators. In it, a former Patch project manager noted:

I would agree that there is information there. And [AI newsletters] still bring local news in. But to me, it’s missing a bit of what makes local news local.