Why does a local newsletter need a real person's voice instead of AI aggregation?

The AI local news sites keep showing up. They look horrible. They're just aggregating content from the internet. The fastest way to look nothing like them is a real person.

"Even though it's a brand name, it's not your newsletter, it's Leander Scoop, it's still powered by a real person."

AI is coming for everything. The way to separate yourself is to be as human as possible. Most of my newsletters open with a short editorial from a real person in that community, because people buy from people, not brands.

What goes in a personal editorial?

Your life in the town. Mine is short, and it takes about ten minutes a week. The team handles the rest of the issue. A good weekly one is about four sentences:

• Where you went this week ("we went to the county fair, it was super fun").
• Something people are looking forward to, like the weather turning or the pool opening.
• An event you'll be at.
• An invitation: come say hi.

It can be as simple as "summer's over, kids are going back to school." Something that acknowledges you or the town, so it sounds like a local. For a first issue, three to six paragraphs on how excited you are to build this for the community is plenty. A picture of you or your family helps. It shows people you're in town and you're not AI.

The best lines are the ones only a local could write. When a new Chick-fil-A was planned near a McDonald's whose intersection already has traffic problems, I could comment on that. Nobody would know the intersection is weird unless they live here. AI can't know that.

"I think that type of insight is what's going to help."

A few small details make it feel human too:

• Send from "Firstname at Brand," not just the brand.
• Use a real signature with a photo.
• Have a local person make your social content, not a generic offshore poster.
• When you go to a restaurant or event, take pictures and send them to whoever builds the issue.

Does it have to be me?

No. You want a face of the brand, or several faces. It doesn't have to be you. My model is a brand plus one or more creators. You could hire a college student to write one section in their own first-person voice.

But someone has to do it. If it doesn't feel like there are real people in a real area, you'll get crushed later. In our newsletters where we skip the editorial and write generic, they don't do as well. Readers have nothing to grab onto.

This also can't be copied by some rich guy from out of town. He doesn't live there, and people feel connected to you personally. The connection is the point.

How much of it can AI do?

Most of it. You can't be all AI: there are already a bunch of all-AI local newsletters, and they're terrible. But you can use AI for 80% or 90% of the work and add the human touch on top. Don't swing to the other extreme of doing everything by hand, either. Use AI, then go over it in advance to make sure it's relevant.

Here's how ours works today:

1. VAs search for events and restaurants by hand. I call it human scraping.
2. AI rewrites what they find in our style, with a custom GPT for the restaurant feature.
3. A local person writes the editorial at the top: here's what we've been up to, I can't believe they shut the freeway down again this week.

A good target is roughly 80% curated and 20% things you create yourself: interviews, photos, hosting events, photos at the events. I'm not even fully doing that yet. My senior newsletter is still mostly me curating. For my six newest newsletters, I don't have anyone on the ground at all, and that's fine to start. People complain about Amazon and still buy from it, and they'll read a mostly automated newsletter today. Long term, I think the human element is necessary, and we'll hire locally when it matters, because somebody has to do Instagram too.

The hardest part is making sure content isn't garbage. A local person is what tells you whether a road change is a big deal or a little two-lane road nobody cares about. More and more, the operator's job shifts from writer to editor.

Which sections can AI not replace?

• Pet of the month with a local shelter.
• Volunteer opportunities and nonprofit spotlights.
• Memes and GIFs picked by someone with a sense of humor.
• First-hand notes, like actually visiting the restaurant.
• Original local stories, like interviewing a neighbor about her son winning a national championship.

Technically AI could do some of these. It won't, for years. These are the things that make you relatable, and relatable is how you build relationships. You start talking to the shelter, the volunteer groups and the chamber people, and that's where the real goal is.

Why does first person beat straight curation?

The local paper, 20 years ago or today, doesn't talk about itself. It's third-person journalism. Ours is written in the first person: I'm a local, these are my kids. That builds a personal brand, and it makes it obvious you actually live there.

"We are not journalists. We don't claim to be journalists. We're just people in the community providing valuable information as community members."

I call it creator-led local media. We curate events, restaurants, local businesses and jobs, then add a creator's content on top. Curation is good, and people like it. I think of it as a stepping stone. The upgrade is original writing and local features.

The best-performing B2B local newsletter I know reads like a diary: I hosted this event, I met Sally, Sally's great, here's her LinkedIn. It's not just curating other sources.

AI search points the same way. Third-person content can be generated with a snap of the fingers. First-person content can't. That's why I do business interviews for free. Uriah Kaiser of Potomac Local News made the same argument on my podcast: he wants readers asking an AI assistant what Uriah said.

The voice is half the value. The other half is growth. There are AI networks bragging about 400 newsletters, and nobody sees them. A real person plus Meta ads and Instagram is how people actually find you.

Why does this help the owner's business?

If you sell something (real estate, mortgages, insurance), readers constantly seeing you as a nice, normal person in the community makes you top of mind.

"Why are you going to Google for a realtor or mortgage guy if you see him all the time and he seems awesome?"

It works in person too. At the chamber, when the other insurance guys are over there and you're the only one with thousands of local people reading what you write, that's your in. Insurance becomes the secondary conversation, not the pitch.

What about Gmail summarizing my newsletter?

The answer is to build something people would proactively miss. Inbox summaries technically already exist. They aren't good. A guest on my podcast who runs a newsletter in the Catskills, Michael Kauffman, put it this way: readers still open a trusted free newsletter because they know locals wrote it.

Your competition isn't other newsletters. It's traditional media, and local businesses not understanding the model yet.