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

Axios is a media company delivering vital, trustworthy news and analysis in the most efficient, illuminating and shareable 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. 

We spoke with Allison Murphy, Chief Operating Officer at Axios, about AI supporting high-impact local journalism and serving communities better.

How is AI helping Axios Local reporters deliver more high-impact journalism?

AI is already a huge part of how Axios Local works. At the core, what we’re trying to do is prove that you can run a sustainable, profitable local news model that delivers high-quality journalism to every community in America. That means solving for scale and efficiency—and that’s exactly what AI is good at. So there’s a really 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 where it’s really made a difference is helping reporters do important work faster. Readers come to Axios for smart brevity, so we built a custom GPT called the Axiomizer. Reporters drop in their drafts and it suggests sharper headlines, clearer “Why it matters,” “What’s next,” and “Between the lines”—basically helping great reporting land even better with readers.

It’s not replacing journalists. It’s taking strong, expert reporting and making it crisper, clearer, and more useful. We’re also adding editing and style checks into the tool so copy editors can focus on what really needs human judgment, instead of spending time on basic fixes or formatting.

The result is that everyone—reporters and editors alike—gets more time to focus on high-impact journalism, while AI handles the busywork in the background.

“[AI] has already become central in how we do the work of Axios Local.”

—Allison Murphy, Chief Operating Officer, Axios

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—Allison Murphy, Chief Operating Officer, Axios

Listen

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