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What if you took Morning Brew's approach to newsletter writing and applied it to local news? That was the original idea behind 6AM City, a company that launched its first newsletter in Greenville, South Carolina in 2016 and gradually expanded into over a dozen cities.
For most of its history, 6AM City's approach was to hire a handful of editors in each city and then gradually build up an audience and advertiser base. But in the last year, it developed a playbook for using AI to launch newsletters in smaller, less populated areas, with the goal of eventually hiring human editors once those newsletters reached certain thresholds.
In a recent interview, co-founder Ryan Heafy explained how these AI newsletters actually work, where they get their information, and what guardrails the company has put in place to ensure quality control.
The Business of Content with Simon Owens