How The Jersey Bee uses AI to deliver local news more effectively

How The Jersey Bee uses AI to deliver local news more effectively

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The Jersey Bee's AI model powers a network of 13 local newsletters to deliver over 5,000 local news briefs a year

1 in every 5 newspapers has disappeared in the USA since 2004, creating news deserts. This has left 200 counties without any source for local updates and 1,449 counties with only 1 local newspaper, often a weekly with limited resources. The shrinking media landscape bears a direct impact not only on the locals’ awareness of their locality but also induces a loss of civic participation and reduces the voter turnout.

US counties represented with a single newspaper (yellow) and counties with no local newspaper (red) by the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media

Simon Galperin, a John S. Knight Journalism fellow, states that “The news hasn't worked for immigrants, working class people and communities of colour in the United States for at least a century, if not longer. So while news desertification is an increasingly well-known and well-recognised problem, the challenges started a long time ago.”

Born to Ukrainian parents in Moscow, Galperin immigrated from the former Soviet Union to the U.S in 1992. He shares that his experience as an immigrant made him realise how traditional news often leaves out minority identities at the local level. This motivated him to launch The Jersey Bee, a nonprofit local news organisation for people of colour, working-class and immigrant communities across Essex County.

How The Jersey Bee got started

The Jersey Bee was initially established as The Bloomfield Information Project in April 2020 as a way to provide reliable news and information during the pandemic. They started by serving local news reports and mutual aid text messages to residents of Bloomfield. In 2023, they rebranded as The Jersey Bee and by the end of the year, they had expanded to 12 cities and towns in Essex County. 2024 was their first year of sustaining their expansion.

Galperin as the Executive Editor of The Jersey Bee says, “Our goal is to be a place that broadly and holistically responds to people's news and information needs with a specific focus on the people who have historically had their needs unmet.” For this, the team takes special care to design and amplify news that is useful for the community.

The Jersey Bee’s editorial policy is honed to cater to the local information needs. Their newsletter is guided by four news values -

  • Proximity - Stories must be relevant to communities within a 15–20 minute radius of the town or city
  • Timeliness - Coverage prioritises upcoming events and community gatherings
  • Utility - Practical information is selected, including available resources and aid
  • DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] - Content is selected to help serve historically marginalised communities, ensuring their needs are met.

More than the information they choose to amplify, it is their way to gather and distribute the news that makes the difference. “We are really effective in understanding people's information needs, figuring out where that information is available and then building a system that meets those needs,” explains Galperin.

Harvest, the AI model that makes delivering local news effective

While working during the pandemic, the team realised that it was becoming increasingly difficult for locals to stay informed about news in their community. As Galperin puts it, “Information was ‘pieces here, pieces there,’ with no single reliable source.” To solve this, they decide to curate it into a singular entity that gets dropped directly into their emails. This idea of a curated newsletter, one for each town, was possible due to their AI automated model, Harvest.

Harvest is The Jersey Bee’s system that maps, curates and distributes local and civic information at scale with minimum human dependency. The system essentially harvests updates from dozens of sources like school websites, Facebook pages and local news outlets. When a piece of news or an event is identified as relevant according to their editorial guidelines, it gets pulled via a web clipper tool into a shared Airtable setup that serves as a central hub for content management.

From there, automations take over on their custom Zapier workflows that power content distribution across multiple platforms. Zapier triggers ChatGPT to generate a draft summary, suggest appropriate headlines for news and titles for upcoming events. These events also get tagged with information regarding their date, location and theme. Once assigned a tag like ‘free event’ or ‘local government meeting,’ the system automatically assigns them to the relevant newsletter of their 13 newsletters.

Human editors then review and refine the content before publication. Then Mailchimp distributes newsletters, WordPress hosts web updates and Zapier automations create Instagram posts from the same content, by using HTML/CSS templates. By combining AI-driven drafting with thoughtful human editing, the Harvest model lets a small team efficiently manage and distribute hundreds of local updates. This workflow ensures that useful community information doesn’t fall through any cracks.

Galperin explains that The Jersey Bee has a uniquely scalable use case of AI for local news. They have used their provisional patent model, Harvest, to reduce friction in their local news production process. With a team of just 1.5 people, the organisation had produced nearly 5,000 briefs and more than 2,200 daily newsletters last year.

Image of The Jersey Bee’s newsletter by Simon Galperin


Harvest has helped them find, amplify and distribute local information within the right communities – a feat that even Facebook’s News Feed was unable to do. Back in 2018, Facebook was focused on promoting more local news on its social media app. They were unable to do so. Galperin explains that, “after they launched [the feature] they realised that there was a huge vacuum because there wasn't enough local news to fill their page”. After 2024, Meta shut down its News Tab. Their recent feature Local Tab has no mention of featuring local news and information.

The impact

Last year, The Jersey Bee had 75,000 regional website users and 14,000 unique monthly users across digital platforms. Currently, they have 2,800 newsletter subscribers. Two-thirds of  their audience are women with most being 25 to 65 years of age. True to their mission, their reader base is diverse with half of them being people of colour.

Galperin says:

It's hard to sustain a local news brand, especially a community-driven brand, when there's a very small population you're serving

The Jersey Bee is primarily funded by various foundations. A third of their annual funding is provided by the NJ Civic Info Consortium, a public charity created by the state to fund local news and information. They plan to diversify their revenue streams going forward.

In a recent survey of their readers, they found that 75% of respondents had performed civic action in some capacity. Galperin narrates that one of their readers was prompted to attend one such event which was featured in their newsletter. By doing so, he discovered a community that helped him combat isolation and find a sense of belonging.

“And that's why people of all ages and all demographics come to us. News and information play such a vital role in helping address isolation. People see the value of being able to have a neighbour that they know and a community where they can meaningfully get involved,” says Galperin.

Parisa Burton from The Jersey Bee (photo courtesy of The Jersey Bee)

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Priyal Shah
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