6 things to know about PubGen.AI:

AI-tuned for journalism: PubGen.AI grounds its tools in newsroom archives, style guides and ethics, ensuring relevance and trust.

Efficiency gains: Reporters produce 1.3–3 times more output, clerks handle 10 times more press releases and editors streamline workflows.

Revenue growth: Early adopters like the Lewiston Tribune saw a 228% jump in digital revenue within 90 days.

All-in-one platform: Combines editorial workflow, print layout, paywalls, ads, analytics and subscriptions into one system.

SEO & AI search ready: Automatic sitemaps, schema updates and near-perfect Google PageSpeed scores help content surface in Google and AI snippets.

Community grounding: Readers and reporters can query archives directly, linking AI responses to real local reporting — not generic web sources.

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On the latest episode of Keep It Local, Local Media Association’s Ryan Welton spoke with Jon Rust, president of Rust Communications, Sho Rust, CEO of PubGen.AI, and Michael Machiah, co-founder, about the company’s push to bring artificial intelligence into the heart of newsroom operations.

The Rust family, publishers of the Southeast Missourian and 14 other newspapers, partnered with PubGen.AI to create an AI-powered content management system designed specifically for journalism.

“I felt like journalism deserved better,” Sho Rust said. “A lot of the technology out there was very dated. It was extremely expensive. And then I didn’t really see a sustainable path. So it felt like we needed to do something (and that) we could do something that would really change the course of journalism and really help the industry.”

Unlike older systems that require add-ons and plug-ins, PubGen.AI integrates editorial workflow, subscriptions, advertising, analytics and print layout into a single platform.

“Right now, newsrooms have to focus too much. On figuring out how to get paywalls to work, subscriptions to work and a lot of other things to work. In the age of AI, (this is) something that I don’t think newsrooms can really afford to be late on,” Sho said.

According to Sho, adoption of PubGen.AI is already delivering measurable gains. “For example, Lewiston Tribune, they went up 228% on digital revenue in the first 90 days. They saw ad engagement go up 70% in the same 90 days.”

Jon Rust added: “In our operation, we’re seeing about a 10 times multiple of efficiency improvements in the number of like press releases and government documents that our news clerks can handle. We’re seeing about a 1.3 to three times improvement of what our reporters are doing and our editors on just the basic news stories.”

When asked about his background in organizational psychology, Michael Machiah said it helped the team think through change management, which is often the hardest part for newsrooms.

“One of the difficulties of a startup is to have a really good collaboration throughout (both) the good and difficult times,” he said.

Machiah also emphasized the importance of data migration — a step that many publishers dread when migrating to a new platform.

“There’s a cleanup. There’s also deduplication — and there’s a part of the strategy of deciding where they want to be now, where they wanna go in the future. And then making sure that all the content is perfectly geared towards that,” he said.

A key feature of PubGen.AI, Sho said, is that the system is trained not on generic web content but on each newsroom’s archives and style.

“How smart is an AI if it’s not grounded in your community? If it doesn’t know about the business that opened across the street, and it’s just linking to who, who knows what it is. Where you can actually click into it and actually see the article and see the author, see the citations behind the ideas that it’s sharing is really important in that way,” he said.

Sho emphasized the mission at the close of the interview: “We actually think in the age of AI, journalists are actually more important than ever before. And then there will actually be a lot of interest in new revenue models that we can help these newsrooms adopt and then help them grow.”

Jon Rust added: “People really need to start looking at AI, whether it’s with PubGen or something else — but PubGen is really tuned to journalism. Everyone really needs to be looking at the impact of AI and how they can use it if they’re not.”

How to listen to the Keep It Local podcast:

🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5nNjqMhwtby7tpnYcom39O

🎧 Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-pubgen-ai-is-reinventing-the-newsroom-cms-with-ai/id1808196993?i=1000728955563

🎧 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjcQc93xFWM

If you’ve listened to and enjoyed this podcast, please take a moment to leave us a review. That helps platform algorithms surface the content so that it can benefit other newsrooms.

Editor’s note: Artificial Intelligence was used to transcribe and create an initial summary of this article, which was then edited by LMA staff.