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How INN is developing AI-powered products to broaden members’ reach

April 4, 2025

By Andrew Haeg

INN is building a “new kind of news network,” that “ensures all people in every community have access to trusted news.” A lofty and urgent mission, given the need for timely, non-partisan news and information to navigate this chaotic moment. 

While INN’s 475+ members produce nearly 26,000 stories every month, providing an unrivaled and grounded insight into pressing issues and events, key infrastructure is required to build a true network. Over the past year, INN has built On The Ground, a technological foundation for this “new” kind of networked news ecosystem, and it is starting to bear fruit.

On the Ground

In the lead-up to the elections, seeing the demand for high-quality, local news to underpin our understanding of how voters were making up their minds, INN launched On the Ground (OTG) to enable INN members to easily share their politics and elections stories for republication by other news outlets. INN built OTG after speaking to many members who were making their content free to republish, but struggled to systematically do so. 

And that’s where the new technical infrastructure kicked into gear. INN was already aggregating all of our members’ stories via our partner Overtone. INN plugged that feed into its new partner Nota’s AI summarization tool, which was then connected to a Slack feed. More than 90 INN newsrooms opted into OTG, and every week we hand-pick a selection of those stories to share via a weekly, localized email digest as well as a Slack feed.

Here, Maine Monitor — one of many newsrooms participating in OTG — is interviewing town officials on the preparations the town of Norridgewock has taken to prevent future flooding. (Garrick Hoffman)

Now that the pipeline is built, it’s easy to adjust what goes in and what goes out in many ways – allowing partnerships and deals to extend the reach of member content. The feed of stories was compelling and unique enough to catch the attention of The Associated Press. In October, INN announced a partnership with the AP to plug On the Ground into AP Newsroom, making INN members’ elections and political coverage available to 2,700+ news outlets around the US. 

Since On the Ground launched with AP, member stories have been accessed more than 1,500 times. 

Data from the AP has revealed a remarkable array of newsrooms (by type and location) taking in INN member content: 

Type of News Organization

Regional Breakdown

INN analyzed the stories that were republished to get a better sense of what was being republished, and crucially why, and found some distinct patterns. Among the elections stories there was a special interest in stories about voter suppression and turnout, state ballot initiatives and electoral outreach, as evidenced by the top 3 picked-up election stories: 

There was also marked interest in climate and environment stories, including those that covered state climate laws, agriculture and farming-related climate questions and local energy policy. 

And finally, rural stories generated quite a bit of interest, possibly because (outside of INN’s own Rural News Network) the news industry under-invests in rural coverage, and many rural areas are or are becoming news deserts:

It’s a small sample, over a short period, but it appears that the kind of stories ripe for broad pickup tend to be those that provide a specific, local and human perspective of a broader, national or global issue; or that reveal the effects of policy decisions on real people.

Having OTG in hand has made it straightforward for INN to work with Public News Service, which adapts news stories to air on radio stations around the country, with a special focus on serving rural audiences. To date, PNS has broadcast 15 stories from On the Ground newsrooms, airing on 547 stations, and reaching an estimated audience of more than 8 million listeners.  

As INN’s product line and partnerships grow, so too will the ability to guide members in ensuring their stories can reach the broadest possible audiences. 

Collective impact: INN’s product vision

The small and medium nonprofit newsrooms that make up the bulk of INN’s membership are too often “fried and frozen” as former INN board member and COLab Executive Director Laura Frank puts it. They’re running at full tilt (fried) and don’t want to risk precious resources on trying new things that might not work (frozen). 

INN is designing products with this in mind. On the Ground and Text RURAL are no- to low-lift for newsrooms. The pipeline picks up member content, filters, summarizes and routes it to the right destination at the right time.       

There is still a long way to go before every story that a member produces reaches the  audiences who benefit from the coverage. There are sticky issues to solve, from ensuring photos are rights-cleared for syndication, making stories easily discoverable and re-publishable within a content management system (CMS), accurately tracking the reach of news stories as they spread, and repurposing long-form text stories to make them more accessible and consumable across media. 

To that end, INN will soon kick off a new partnership with Newspack to solve many of these pain points for the 100+ INN members who are also users of the Newspack CMS. They will be able to simply search for content and republish with a few clicks, knowing that all photos attached are rights-cleared, and will receive a post-republication report with stats on how their content is performing.   

Evolving On the Ground to meet the moment

Beyond unfrying and unfreezing newsrooms with simple but powerful products, INN is exploring new partnerships that will channel the best member content to the right audiences in the format most likely to be read, watched or heard—so it can have the greatest impact. 

In the short term, this means extending On the Ground to add a feed focused on the effects of government action on communities. Whether it’s a story about undocumented workers cleaning up after the LA wildfires, even amidst ICE raids; the effects of federal budget cuts on Virginians; or the cancellation of federal contracts for education studies, INN member newsrooms are in the best position to closely track the effects of government action on people and their communities.

In the medium term, INN will be experimenting with developing a marketplace of sorts where other newsrooms, policy-minded professionals, and deeply curious newshounds can discover the best INN content, and create their own feeds. Down the road, there is incredible potential in AI-assisted video and audio (i.e. not AI generated), story discovery widgets and much more.  

It’s one thing to call ourselves a new kind of news network—now we’re actually assembling the pieces to make it real. 

You can sign your newsroom up for On the Ground and / or sign up to receive the feed of stories here.

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