From Barrie to Berlin: How AI is rewriting the future of local publishing

An AI-powered CMS from Draiper could help European publishers scale local relevance — without ballooning newsroom headcount

In the not-too-distant past, localisation in newsrooms was a painstaking, manual task. At one small city newspaper where I worked, every afternoon we would huddle around the telex machine, waiting for the national agricultural produce prices to spool out - a long reel of thin paper covered in tiny, smudged text.

Then the real work began: scanning line by line for crops that mattered to our readers - potatoes from the valley farms, oranges from the nearby citrus belt. We would reangle the raw market data into stories that felt local and relevant, tailored to the towns and villages where our editions were printed and distributed.

It was labour-intensive, slow and tedious - but it was the only way to ensure our coverage resonated beyond the national headlines. The effort paid off: what I called giving our reports 'emotional proximity’ to our audience, was reflected in our growing circulation numbers.

Today, AI can do in seconds what used to take a small newsroom hours. And platforms like Draiper’s ContentFlow show how localisation, once a bottleneck, can now become a strategic advantage.

The BarrieDaily website is a real example of what’s possible. While the site itself runs on WordPress, the content creation engine behind it is Draiper ContentFlow — a flexible AI-driven CMS developed by Draiper Inc. that integrates easily into existing publishing workflows.

BarrieDaily isn’t just another automated content site - it’s an example of how AI can empower lean newsrooms to deliver local, emotionally relevant journalism.

At its core, Draiper ContentFlow pulls in news from a wide range of sources, then rewrites and reshapes it to match the interests and emotional landscape of the local community. Whether it’s reframing a broader economic trend through the lens of Barrie residents or finding a staycation angle in national travel data. The system identifies the 'emotional proximity' by finding the invisible thread that ties a reader’s everyday life to the bigger story.

It’s not about automating newsrooms out of existence; rather, it’s about making them faster, smarter and better equipped to serve their audiences without requiring massive editorial teams or endless manual effort, explains Tim Brown, co-founder of Draiper Inc.

BarrieDaily proves that the dream we chased years ago, laboriously crafting local relevance from wire services and national reports, can now be achieved with a fraction of the time and resources — and without losing the human touch that makes local journalism matter.

"For years, smaller publishers were forced to choose between relevance and scale," says Tim, "Our goal with Draiper ContentFlow was simple: give publishers the tools to create emotionally resonant, locally meaningful content without needing newsroom resources they simply don't have. The technology doesn't replace journalism. It supercharges it."

Tim explains that his aim while building the platform was not just to automate publishing but also to elevate it.

But how does it work? It’s a linear process that unfolds (almost) in this sequence:

Content ingestion and scanning

The CMS pulls in news articles from trusted external sources across a wide range of topics - local, national and international.

Emotional proximity detection

Instead of simply syndicating generic content, the system identifies stories that could be re-angled to resonate with the local audience. It’s trained to spot the human, community-level connections hidden inside larger narratives much like our newsroom teams once did manually, but now at machine speed.

Localisation and rewriting

The AI doesn't just translate or reword. It reshapes stories, pulling local angles to the forefront - whether that's a housing affordability story reframed through Barrie rental prices or a national travel trend reinterpreted as a staycation movement. Headlines, subheadlines, cross-headlines and content summarisation options are fully automated.

Style training and voice consistency

Editors can "teach" Draiper ContentFlow a specific writing style based on examples. Whether it's formal news copy, breezy lifestyle features or B2B technical writing, the system learns and mimics the publication’s tone — ensuring a consistent brand voice without constant human intervention.

As Tim notes: "Large language models are great mimics… For example, when setting up BarrieDaily’s sports section, I simply told the system to 'write in the style of Don Cherry,' the famous hockey pundit. It means you can have a lively, distinct voice for sports and a completely different tone for politics — all within the same publishing framework."

Because Draiper ContentFlow is designed as a human-in-the-loop system, editors and publishers can inject their own personality or judgment at any time — blending automation with authentic editorial control.

Minimal staffing requirements

Designed for small or resource-strapped teams, Draiper ContentFlow can generate publishable articles with light editorial oversight, enabling even modest operations to maintain a steady publishing cadence without hiring armies of reporters.

Across Europe - from local newspapers in the Nordics to specialist B2B publishers in Central and Eastern Europe — the pressure on small to mid-sized media outlets is mounting.

Fragmented markets, multilingual audiences, tightening budgets and shrinking editorial teams all paint a familiar picture. At the same time, the demand for high-frequency, relevant content has never been greater - whether it's daily news, specialist reports or niche market insights.

Tim says Draiper’s technology can be scaled across various niche publications. He references several examples:

Regional publishers

Imagine a local Spanish newspaper instantly reframing EU-wide policy news through the lens of a fishing community in Galicia. Or a Finnish outlet localising global inflation trends into stories about Lapland tourism. Not by hiring new specialist correspondents but by training the content flow system to surface and shape relevance automatically.

B2B publishers

Think about a small publisher in Poland, specialising in renewable energy news, using AI to pull and reframe global technology developments for its niche readership - publishing more frequently, with greater local insight and without expanding the editorial headcount.

Multilingual markets

With AI-assisted language support, publications serving multilingual regions (like Belgium or Switzerland) could generate localised versions of stories with minimal human translation overhead, while maintaining editorial voice and nuance.

In each case, the opportunity is not to replace journalists, but to amplify their reach - freeing up human creativity for deeper investigations, richer features and audience engagement, while Draiper ContentFlow handles the repeatable yet essential daily work.

For European media owners balancing the cost of doing more with the necessity of staying relevant, this isn't just an efficiency play - it could be their survival strategy.

But there’s another reason why platforms like Draiper ContentFlow are well-timed for Europe, says Tim: "As audiences increasingly turn away from mass-market ‘lamestream' media in favour of smaller, trusted, niche outlets, the ability to scale tailored, relevant local content will only become more valuable.

"For those who seize it, the future of publishing might not just be faster or cheaper - it could be much more personal too."