News Corp utilizes AI to generate local council news stories

Melbourne tabloid The Herald Sun has outsourced major parts of its local coverage to artificial intelligence, expanding its use of the technology from traffic and weather reports to full news stories.

Six years after shutting down dozens of suburban and regional papers, the News Corp-owned Herald Sun has published a handful of stories this week under the brand Leader, which is the name of its community division for the state.

At the end of the articles, it flags each one was produced using AI and then checked by a human editor before publication.

The articles in The Herald Sun, which is the publisher’s flagship newspaper in Victoria, appear to draw on information from recent council meeting minutes for several Melbourne metropolitan and regional areas including Moonee Valley and Monash City Council.

News Corp shuttered the 20 print titles under the Leader group banner in 2020 and has made a number of journalists in its local news division redundant in the years since. It continues to publish content online under the digital banners of some of those titles.

This week, it has run articles under headlines including “Mount Waverley car park to lose 48 spaces for expanded outdoor dining”; “Resident slams Moonee Valley Council over flood claim legal battle spending” and “Moonee Ponds residents demand answers on racecourse dust and ‘shaking’ homes”.

The articles, which also feature AI-generated imagery, note at the bottom that they form part of a News Corp ambition to “publish more regional and community stories than ever before”. News Corp also states the articles were created with “AI assistance” and then edited and approved by an editor.

A Herald Sun spokeswoman said the masthead was exploring ways to cover under-serviced regional and community areas, including using AI. Journalist roles would not be affected and staff were positive about the plans, she said.

“No roles will be reduced because of this project or in the event that it is expanded, as this is being conducted in addition to a significant investment in journalists who will be based in regional Victoria,” she said. “Any story created with the assistance of verified AI is edited and approved for publication by an editor, and it is clearly and transparently identified and labelled as such.”

News Corp signed a global deal with ChatGPT-creator OpenAI worth $250 million in 2024, allowing the AI firm to use News Corp content in its responses.

News Corp global chief executive Robert Thomson revealed in his recent cross-examination during the Murdoch family trial that the deal is “actually more than that”. This year, it also signed a content licensing deal with Facebook-owner Meta worth $US50 million ($70 million) per year.

News Corp unveiled a proprietary product, NewsGPT, in 2025, allowing journalists to draft stories or summarise documents or meetings.

Australian media bosses, including local News Corp boss Michael Miller, have been vocal on lobbying the federal government for legislation requiring AI firms to compensate news outlets for the use of their content to train their language models and reproduce information.

During a National Press Club appearance two years ago, Miller said media companies should start using AI as a tool to produce better work, but insisted “we’re not going to see journalists replaced by AI”.

Last year, News Corp and Miller announced the company had begun using AI to produce weather and traffic reports, court listings and articles detailing where to find cheap fuel.

Miller said at the time that 55 per cent of subscriptions to news outlets were driven by local mastheads and stories. Many news organisations use AI in some, often limited ways in the production of news. However, most, including this masthead, forbid its use to write stories for publication or produce photorealistic imagery or illustrations to accompany stories.

Some of the AI-produced articles suggest the content was produced by entering the entire published minutes from council meetings into an AI model to produce a summary or news reproduction.

Asked about a story covering one recent Moonee Valley council meeting, Mayor Rose Iser, who is mentioned in the story, dismissed the need for AI-generated journalism weeks after meetings took place.

“We publish a live recording and meeting minutes pretty quickly. People can get all the information from the council’s website – and it’s free, accessible and accurate,” Iser said.

News Corp discontinued print publication of most of its regional titles in June 2020.

Reduced funding for local and regional news outlets has created news deserts across Australia, often leaving regional areas without any local news coverage aside from regional ABC bureaus. Nine, the owner of this masthead, sold 160 regional titles to Australian Community Media in 2019, many of which have since been shuttered or made digital-only.

A spokesperson for the media union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, said that AI may help with efficiencies, but “it cannot replace the reporting, fact-checking and community knowledge that underpin trusted journalism”.

“The industry has already endured significant newsroom losses, particularly in local and regional media, and there is a real risk that AI is used to replace journalism jobs rather than support journalists,” the spokesperson said.

“Human journalists tell human stories. Communities deserve reporters who know their local area, can build sources, ask difficult questions and hold power to account.”

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