If you’re feeling overwhelmed by AI right now, you’re not alone.

Over the past few months I’ve heard the same questions from small and independent publishers again and again:

• Which AI tools should we actually be using — and for what?
• How do we keep our work grounded in community needs not generic machine output?
• How do we avoid wasteful prompts that burn time, money or trust?

The way I think about it: AI isn’t a strategy. It’s a set of power tools — and like any tool, it should be used thoughtfully, with an eye toward its ethical and environmental impact.

The publishers I’m most excited about aren’t using it to churn out more content. They’re using it to turn community questions into better voter guides, turn messy internal notes into clearer products and workflows, or testing fundraising messages against audience research.  

Where to start? If you're trying to understand the differences between Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, Ethan Mollick tracks the latest features and applications for each model. Want journalism-specific AI help without starting from scratch? Here are three resources worth bookmarking.

• JournalismAI Case Studies — A searchable library of real newsroom AI use cases, useful for publishers looking for practical examples across reporting, workflow, product and audience work. (I recommend filtering the list by tag to narrow by use case.)
• Poynter’s AI Ethics Starter Kit — A solid starting point for newsrooms seeking guidance on AI policy, ethics, transparency and audience trust before implementing.
• Partnership on AI: AI Adoption for Newsrooms — A 10-step guide to choosing, testing, implementing and evaluating AI tools in newsroom operations.

Let’s make AI work for our communities — thoughtfully, transparently and in service of the people we cover. More in this issue:

📋 Playbook: How Jersey Bee designed a voter guide around voter needs
🌟 Publisher Spotlight: Planeta Venus on immigration coverage with dignity
🧪 One Thing to Try: A smarter way to frame your fundraising CTA
🚨 Funding Radar: Grants and fellowships with deadlines in the next month

📋 The Playbook: How Jersey Bee designed a voter guide around voter needs

Primary season means voters scrambling to figure out who’s on their ballot and what they stand for.

For the NJ-11 special Democratic primary, The Jersey Bee treated its voter guide as a social-first, mobile-first service product. Here are a few audience-first decisions worth replicating.

1️⃣ Start with a clear audience job

Instead of replicating the typical candidate guide, Jersey Bee began with community listening: What issues do voters care most about? That led them to focus on:

• One race: the NJ-11 Democratic primary
• One voter moment: “I heard there’s a special election — who’s running?”
• One format: quick interviews that allow voters to easily compare candidates

For small newsrooms, narrowing scope like this can be the difference between shipping something useful vs. publishing something overwhelming.

2️⃣ Design for how people consume info

Jersey Bee designed the guide for a mobile-first experience that included short vertical video interviews with each candidate on top issues. The team excerpted questions on social (where a question about their favorite breakfast sandwich fit right in alongside "why are you running?") to drive reach, and pointed people to a swipeable mobile-first interface on their website for a full comparison of candidates.

The takeaway: when attention is limited, clarity (and humanity!) beats volume.

3️⃣ Build a reusable civic information tool

Once the structure existed — short interviews, consistent questions, mobile navigation — the format became reusable. That same playbook can support:

• school board races
• city council elections
• ballot measure explainers
• collaborative voter information projects.

Treat your voter guide less like a one-off story and more like a product you update each election cycle. 

Why this matters:  When newsrooms design election coverage around specific audience questions, not newsroom habits, the result is faster to produce, easier to reuse and far more useful to voters.

Where AI fits: Jersey Bee also experimented with AI in ways that supported reporting rather than replacing it. Other ways to consider bringing AI into your workflows:

• Interview prep: use tools like ChatGPT or Claude to scan candidate sites and generate possible question angles
• Transcription: tools like Whisper or Descript can quickly convert video interviews into text
• Summaries: generate draft bullet summaries of candidate responses, then fact-check
• Structured data: store candidate answers in tools like Airtable to build easy comparison formats
• Workflow automation: Zapier or Make can automatically move transcripts and summaries into publishing tools.

The goal isn’t automation. It’s removing friction from the reporting process so journalists can spend more time engaging the community.

Read the full case study from CCM →

🌟 Publisher Spotlight: Planeta Venus

Most immigration coverage focuses on policy fights or political rhetoric. Planeta Venus starts somewhere else: the safety and dignity of the people living the story.

The bilingual newsroom serves Spanish-speaking and Latino communities in Wichita, Kansas, where immigration coverage isn’t just a beat — it’s deeply personal for readers and sources alike. That perspective shaped Covering Immigration, a reporting toolkit created by founder and editor-in-chief Claudia Yaujar-Amaro during her Reynolds Journalism Institute fellowship.

💡
Community publishers often hold the deepest expertise about the communities they serve — but that knowledge rarely gets documented and shared.

Claudia built the toolkit around a simple but overlooked question: What does responsible immigration reporting look like for the communities most affected by it?

The result is a practical resource that helps journalists cover immigration with more context and care. Inside the toolkit:

• Ethical reporting frameworks for interviewing vulnerable sources
• Safety guidance for protecting people who could face legal or social consequences
• Story framing strategies that move beyond crisis narratives
• Case studies and reporting tools journalists can adapt in their own communities.

By turning her newsroom’s approach into a public toolkit, Claudia created something that helps journalists across the country raise the bar for immigration coverage.

👉 Explore the Covering Immigration toolkit →

🧪 One Thing to Try: Words That Work

Here’s a reality check from Press Forward’s Words That Work research: Even as local coverage shrinks, more than 8 in 10 Americans say they can easily find find and access trustworthy local news and information. That perception gap can show up in fundraising messages if appeals lead with newsroom scarcity instead of audience value.

Press Forward's research drew from a national survey, interviews, focus groups and message testing. Their key insight: People respond better to messages about what local news does for them, not abstract appeals about journalism or democracy.

This month, try a simple experiment.

1. Look at your current donation CTA.
2. Rewrite it using the WIIFM frame: What’s in it for me?

Formula: [Community benefit] + [what your reporting made possible] + [invitation to sustain it]

Example: “Your support helped 2,000 families find free tax prep this year. Help keep that information flowing.”

Then A/B test it against your current message for the rest of March.

About 70% of Americans say they’re willing to pay for local news they trust. The question is whether your ask makes that trust feel tangible.

👉 Download the Words That Work toolkit →

🚨 Grants, Fellowships & Funding Radar

A few opportunities worth forwarding:

Listening Post Collective – Civic Media Playbook Grants Support for community-led research and outreach using the Civic Media Playbook (Modules 1–3). 💰 Up to $20,000 ⏰ Deadline: March 15

National Press Foundation – Local Business Journalism Fellowship Four-day, expenses-paid training focused on covering local economies. ⏰ Apply by March 23

McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism – Reporting grants and editorial support for ambitious enterprise and investigative stories with a strong business, economic or financial angle. 💰 Up to $15,000 ⏰ Deadline: April 13

IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship (2027) Two-semester fellowship combining research at MIT with reporting for Boston Globe Media.
⏰ Deadline: April 19

Fund for Investigative Journalism – Reporting and seed grants supporting watchdog and investigative projects by independent and local journalists. 💰 Up to $10,000 (regular) and $2,500 (seed) ⏰ Deadline: April 27

Grants for Journalists Directory A growing, searchable list of journalism fellowships and funding opportunities curated by RJI fellow Monica Williams.

💬 How are you using AI? Tell me about your best prompts, workflow hacks and use cases — or reach out if you're interested in leveraging AI for audience research (our current obsession). We'd love to work with you!

Audience Almanac is a monthly newsletter from Agencia Media — delivering practical frameworks, funding leads and community-first models for publishers doing the work. Have something we should feature? Reply and tell us. Know a publisher who could use this? Please forward!

Thanks for reading.
Amanda ✌