Local Journalism and News Deserts in the AI Turn: Practices and Perceptions of Reporters in Spain

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into journalism is an expanding field of study. However, academic research remains limited on its implications for the coverage of local territories and news deserts. This study therefore seeks to generate empirical evidence through an exploratory design based on three focus groups with local journalism professionals in Spain, a country characterised by a distinctive and well-developed local media ecosystem in terms of both typology and territorial structure. The focus groups were conducted in Catalonia, Madrid, and Galicia to capture a diversity of perspectives. The research aimed to identify how local journalists use and perceive AI, as well as to examine the value they attribute to this technology for reporting on local territories and news deserts. The findings indicate that AI use is concentrated primarily in assistive tasks such as transcription and stylistic revision. While some professionals view AI as a means of streamlining routines, others emphasise its potential to increase workloads, enhance immediacy, and reshape professional roles within newsrooms. Participants also suggest that, in the coverage of local territories and news deserts, AI may generate misinformation due to limited hyperlocal knowledge, promote uniform news coverage, and undermine the trust that underpins proximity journalism.