How Axios uses AI to help deliver high-impact local journalism

Source: OpenAI Blog

Axios – A Media Company

Axios delivers vital, trustworthy news and analysis in the most efficient, illuminating, and share‑able ways possible. It offers a mix of original and smartly narrated coverage of media trends, tech, business, and politics with expertise, voice, and smart brevity.

---

Interview with Allison Murphy, COO of Axios

We spoke with Allison Murphy, Chief Operating Officer at Axios, about how AI supports high‑impact local journalism and serves communities better.

AI at the Core of Axios Local

“[AI] has already become central in how we do the work of Axios Local.”
—Allison Murphy, Chief Operating Officer, Axios

AI is already a huge part of how Axios Local works. At the core, we’re trying to prove that a sustainable, profitable local‑news model can deliver high‑quality journalism to every community in America. That means solving for scale and efficiency—exactly what AI excels at. There’s a natural fit between what OpenAI is building and what we’re building at Axios Local.

We use AI across the whole workflow—from story creation to editing to distribution—but the biggest impact is helping reporters do important work faster.

• Custom GPT – the Axiomizer
  Reporters drop their drafts into the Axiomizer. It suggests sharper headlines, clearer “Why it matters,” “What’s next,” and “Between the lines,” essentially helping great reporting land even better with readers.

• Not a Replacement
  AI isn’t replacing journalists. It takes strong, expert reporting and makes it crisper, clearer, and more useful. Editing and style checks are baked into the tool, freeing copy editors to focus on decisions that truly require human judgment.

The result? Reporters and editors get more time for high‑impact journalism while AI handles the busywork in the background.

How AI Changes the Way We Work

“We want to make it so that a reporter can spend all of their time doing the unique work that only an expert human reporter can do.”
—Allison Murphy, Chief Operating Officer, Axios

Listen (audio placeholder)

Our goal is to let reporters spend their time doing what only humans can do—talking to sources, digging into data, and telling great stories. Every minute saved on production, formatting, or busywork is a win.

• One‑Reporter Cities – With AI‑powered workflows, a single reporter can launch a new city without needing a whole extra layer of production and support. We’ve already done this in Boulder, CO and Huntsville, AL, our first one‑reporter cities.
• Economic Solution to the Local‑News Crisis – Great local journalism must be deeply tailored to each community, making cost efficiencies hard to achieve. AI changes that math by:
  1. Getting more out of expert reporters and editors.
  2. Stripping out costs that don’t add value for readers.
  3. Improving economics so high‑quality journalism can exist in more places.
• Unlocking Public Data – Vast amounts of public data (city‑council meetings, school‑board recordings, government transcripts) are locked away because no one has time to consume them. AI provides quick, reliable summaries and highlights what matters, turning inaccessible information into usable stories.

Standardizing the Process, Not the Voice

Human reporters remain the non‑negotiable center of Axios. They create trust and give Axios the “neighbor‑in‑your‑pocket” feel. What we standardize is everything around them:

• Consistent Style & Formatting – Technology ensures uniform style, handling formatting, data, and analytics so reporters can focus on storytelling.
• Data‑Driven Insight – Readers care about housing prices, school performance, and community comparisons. Turning raw data into clear, trustworthy insight requires technical work that our tools now automate (clean charts, vetted math, transparent comparisons).

Streamlining News Roundups

One of our biggest time‑sinks has been curating the newsletters that readers love.

• Process Capture – We documented what reporters read, how they decide what’s worth sharing, and which sources they trust.
• AI‑Powered Prompts – Those insights were built into AI prompts. Now reporters receive a short, vetted list of links that already reflects their judgment. They simply pick what works.

What used to take hours now takes minutes, and every city gets a high‑quality roundup.

Key Takeaways

1. AI amplifies, doesn’t replace human journalism.
2. Custom tools like the Axiomizer make reporting sharper and faster.
3. One‑reporter cities prove that AI can scale local news sustainably.
4. Economic efficiency is achieved by removing non‑value‑adding tasks.
5. Public data becomes actionable through AI‑generated summaries.
6. Standardized back‑end processes free reporters to focus on human‑centric work.

Quality Roundup That Still Feels Local and Human

We’ve taken a similar approach across the newsletter—breaking it into components rather than trying to automate the whole thing at once. The more specific the task, the better the results. That gives us control, consistency, and much higher quality.

Another great example is how we listen to readers. We run quarterly surveys across all our cities, but we only have one audience‑insights lead. Before, turning that data into something reporters could actually use took weeks. Now, with AI, we can analyze the responses and generate clear one‑page summaries for every city in less than a day. Reporters get real reader feedback almost immediately, and they can adjust what they cover and how they cover it.

“It’s absolutely critical that we have AI in the hands of the journalists […]”
— Allison Murphy, Chief Operating Officer, Axios

Listen

The value of truly original, expert journalism is only going to keep rising. No AI can build a source relationship or break a scoop. That human trust is irreplaceable, and it’s what great reporting will always be built on.

What AI can do is make that reporting go farther:

1. Unlock hidden information – AI surfaces publicly available but hard‑to‑access material (meeting transcripts, records, data), letting reporters ask better questions and find more stories faster.
2. Transform distribution – A single reported story can now become a newsletter, a video, a podcast, or a social‑media clip without needing a whole production team behind it.

That means a great scoop doesn’t just live in one place anymore—it can reach more audiences, in more formats, with far less friction. There will be disruption, of course. Media always has been. But the upside is huge: more questions answered, more communities served, and more high‑quality journalism getting to the people who need it.

From our perspective, that’s exactly what makes our local mission possible. We’re still early, and there will be bumps along the way—but as long as we stay focused on trust and quality, technology gives us a powerful way to keep expanding what local journalism can be.

---

Axios uses ChatGPT to support research, analysis, and drafts of internal communication updates. OpenAI has partnered with Axios to fund the expansion of Axios Local to cities including Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Boulder, and Huntsville.