Local Journalism, Legacy, and the Age of AI

Peter Weinberger has spent his career at the intersection of community and journalism, first as a photojournalist and, for the past two decades, as the publisher and owner of the Claremont Courier, a family institution since 1955 and one of the oldest papers still publishing in the greater LA area.

 In this episode, Peter talks about what it really means to run a local newspaper in 2025 — the economics, the ethics, and the AI bots that showed up uninvited in November and cut his website traffic in half. He shares why he believes local journalism will survive, what only a human reporter can do, and what he'd tell a journalism student walking in the door today.

 This episode is part of Path Found's AI series.

🎧 Listen to “Path Found Podcast”
Real stories of pivots, side quests, and scenic routes that inspire new possibilities.

📅 New episodes drop every Thursday.

👉 Subscribe & Listen: https://www.youtube.com/@PathFoundPodcast

★ Follow, rate, and share if you’ve ever taken the scenic route.

Get Involved:
🌐 See the work we’re doing at Keystone Network - Web: https://keystonenetwork.org
💬 Submit your comments, questions for guests, or suggest new guests you’d love to hear from!
📷Instagram: @pathfoundpodcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I would just say it takes work and it takes experience. So you want to put yourself in positions where you get experience and then when you do, you do the work it takes to create strong journalism or report, you know, stories, to interact with your subjects in a way, and don't be shy.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Hi everyone, and welcome to Pathfound, the podcast about the real, messy, unexpected journeys that lead us to the work we love. I'm Monica Gandonia, and every week I talk with someone whose story proves there's no single right way to build a meaningful life. Today I'm sitting down with Peter Weinberger, publisher and owner of the Claremont Courier, one of the oldest continuously published newspapers in greater Los Angeles. The Courier has been in his family since 1955 when his parents bought it. Peter took the helm in 2007 and has been at the wheel ever since through some of the most turbulent decades the news industry has ever seen. This conversation is part of my AI series, a set of episodes exploring how artificial intelligence is reshaping different industries and what that means for the people working in them. And if you want to understand what AI is doing to local journalism, there's no better place to start than with someone watching it happen in real time. Peter and I talked about his unlikely path into journalism, starting with a camera and a love of photography, how the economics of print have changed everything. And the moment in November 2025 when the AI bots hit the courier's website and cut their Google referrals in half overnight. He also had some straight talking advice for the next generation of journalists and a warning about what happens when you let AI do your writing for you. Well, today I'm here with Peter Weinberger, the publisher and owner of the Claremont Courier. And I believe it's one of the oldest continuously published newspapers in the greater Los Angeles area. And I know that your parents bought the courier back in the 1950s and you took it over from them, but was journalism always the plan, or did that path surprise you?

SPEAKER_01 2:04

Well, you know, it's hard not to make it your plan when you're growing up with, you know, a newspaper, and that's where you, you know, hang out, where you visit, where you, you know, watch everybody put a paper out every week. So the influence obviously is huge. But the thing that got me going was actually my love for photography, which I started at a very young age. And the courier simply, like it's done for so many other journalists and photojournalists, gave me a chance to show my skills and just get published and learn the process of, you know, photojournalism and how to get, you know, from point A, which is taking the picture, to point Z, which is, you know, seeing it in print somewhere. And so that experience was invaluable. And because of that, you know, I had to aggressively look for jobs, but I was able to literally get a job when I graduated from college at UC Riverside, you know, literally two weeks after I got my diploma. So it would all worked out very good, well for me. But I did what a lot of other people can do too, which is, you know, get some experience, get published, make some connections, and then reach out to people in the, you know, the journalism community, you know, and just be seen go to a workshop or a seminar or that type of thing or a yearly thing. Now, it was happening a lot more back then than it is now. But it's still as far as the gathering process of the profession, you know, there still are opportunities for people wanting to get started to check those out.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

Okay. Did you ever work in kind of national or regional outlets, or did you always work locally?

SPEAKER_01 3:53

I am what's known as well traveled. Okay. So I started at the courier, and at then the courier was kind of, at least in the photography circles, the little newspaper that could, because it was my father was very interested, it was basically a magazine. So the first seven pages of the paper had no ads and they would all have stories, and a lot of them were photo stories. So once the courier started winning awards and this and that, they just kind of blossomed and kind of went from there. But the thing that happened to me also was again through the courier, was I connected with as the director of photography at the Los Angeles Times, and I was able to get a part-time job. I actually was filling in. Back then they had 50, 60 photographers, so somebody was always missing, you know, vacation, sick, whatever. So every weekend I'd fill in for them. And that got me a lot of good experience working for a daily and working for a large paper. In fact, it was sometimes just totally overwhelming as far as the reach it had at the time. You know, it had over a million circulation. So, you know, back then it was a pretty big deal.

SPEAKER_00 5:08

Wow. So you've witnessed some incredible changes and shifts in the media landscape. What do you think is the single biggest change you've seen in how journalism works today?

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Well, I mean, I think the single biggest thing is going digital. I think that that has really changed the profession for the better because we can so quickly, in this in this age of instant news, you've got to have it right away. You know, digital made photography, a key ingredient needed for any website, you know, anything online, anything in print, you can reach an audience almost, you know, immediately. And so, you know, I think the the more when that was evolving, at first it was the quality was a real issue as far as the quality of what digital could produce, but eventually the cameras got better and the transmitting got easier. And now we're at today where literally everyone does it. So I think that that transition was probably the biggest thing I think that's happened. As far as journalism is concerned, I would say I think the the economics of print, I think, is probably the biggest issue, or at least change in the industry that I think has impacted us because print is such a labor-intensive process, and because of that, it's very expensive. You don't have the economics to balance all that out. You're forced to think of other ways of doing things. It kind of blows up your business model, and I think that's what's happened. And like the internet did with so many other occupations.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Right.

SPEAKER_01 6:51

So I think that the economics of printing a print publication or publishing a print publication, say that 10 times, became much more difficult, much more costly. And the readership obviously was not backing it up. You know, the readership was going digital.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

You know, we've seen so many local newspapers just fail, disappear at a pretty alarming rate. What do you think is the secret behind the success of the courier? Why are you still how have you been able to survive that?

SPEAKER_01 7:22

The courier is has a lot of see very active seniors in Claremont. Always has. It's not a retirement community per se, because we have six small colleges. So the Claremont has really been a unique community. And it's also has a for a town of 35,000, it has over 800 nonprofits that have a Claremont address. Now, not all of them have brick and mortar offices. In fact, most of them don't, but that is an enormous amount. And I think a lot of that's because of the colleges. I think a lot of that is because of Claremont's such an active community, and nonprofits get a huge amount of support. And those seniors who come here, which are about 23% of the population, still want print. They still donate to causes, they still volunteer, and they're still very educated into what the community is doing. And I think that skill set, so to speak, is very advantageous to printing a newspaper in Claremont. A printing newspaper, period, I should say. I mean, the only time our print circulation will drop, and remember, it's all paid, so we're not giving this away, and we charge $115 a year for it, and that's for a weekly newspaper, 12 special editions, and open access to our website, which is a full-blown website. So I think that to our readers, we're still at value, but they still want print. A lot of it is age. I think a lot of it is just how active of a community it is. So we kind of fit. And you know, the only reason our print circulation drops is because they've converted to digital. They'd rather just go online, mostly for green reasons. You know, they don't want to use the paper. And so we have about 450 online only subscribers. The other key, which I just read about, is you got to deliver quality journalism. You know, you just can't make it a shopper with a few stories. And I think that a lot of community papers have had to cut. And when you start to get into that cycle of doing that and you're cutting the journalism, it's gonna come back and bite you. And I think that's what happens. It's much easier to lose circulation than it is to gain it back. Right. And so we're very aware of that dynamic and how that could impact us. So we're we do a really a lot with retention. We do a very lot with customer service to just to try to keep the paper coming, but people want it. So, you know, I'm gonna keep printing as long as people want to read it. And the website tends to have a much more broader audience outside of Claremont. It's about three times the size of the print publication, but I mostly give it away. We do have a very light paywall. We don't like, you know, basically we block, you know, you need your subscription, you know, ID to log in to see three to five stories a week, but we're not like blocking it, you know, totally because that information is so important to so many people. So I'm trying to look for a play the fence on how much to give away versus make you pay for. And that is very tricky and it changes. But they, you know, the people right now want print. And I will tell you this about print. It print has no problems with AI because AI cannot influence print. You don't need AI to, you know, yes, we could talk about how stories are written, but I'm just talking about producing it, how it's read, you know, it's not a digital thing, so it's just not impacted by a lot of the things that AI does to the circulation and to other issues that these papers have that we have too. And that is very recent.

SPEAKER_00 11:19

So since you brought up AI, when did you first notice that AI was showing up and that this was gonna be something that was gonna matter to your work?

SPEAKER_01 11:31

November 2025. How is that for an exact? I could probably even tell you the date. It was around the first week of that. That is when the bots hit. And most people know what these are. They are basically AI bots that usually come from Asian countries. They ding your website because they are training their AI models to learn about news and learn about, you know, current news, especially, which is ultra important. Now, I'm sure that other non-news websites are getting hit, but AI has a unique impact on these news websites because of the product that we're producing. And what happened was I didn't even notice it. It was at first, oh look, are we are we we're really going up, you know, it's really going up. Now, when they ding you, there's no like, you know, it's basically literally a ding. I mean, it doesn't sound like that, but you know, they're not like reading anything or they're just trying to learn from our website somehow. And that I don't know exactly how that works, but they clearly are checking it out in some way. Once we got hit with that, our organic readership online dropped, and our referrals from Google and Apple, Safari, dropped by half, and that is a very huge number for any website, and it has impacted our numbers. But the bots hit, they say they don't hurt, they don't impact you. You can block them. They people do geo fences and other, you know, and they do other things. We've got them blocked, but you know, they're kind of like spam calls, you know, where they got your number, you can't get rid of them, even if you like tell them the layoff, you just they keep coming, or you block a number, and well, they've got 40 other numbers to use, so you can't block them, and that's what it feels like, only it's in a different way. And so we just started blocking them intensely, and we'll see, because you know, you could block China and Singapore all of a sudden somehow jumps up, and then you block Singapore, and all of a sudden Amsterdam of all places pops up, you know, and you're talking about the equivalent of our entire normal traffic. This isn't like a hundred or two hundred, we're talking thousands of these pings, these checks of our website that somehow, in many ways, impact how people read our website. So that's why I mentioned that. But Google is just as concerned as we are because it's changing the way people are searching for news for information. So an AI doesn't do it the way a browser does. You know, a browser will instantly, one of the most prominent things would be a person's website or a newspaper's website. So, you know, if there's a a story about Claremont, it gets on Google, you know, it'll get put on the on the search menu, and it's going to be a link to that story, a story, and it's right there. Google doesn't operate that way. They may tell you the answer without giving any connection on exactly where they found it. Or even if there is a link, it's not as obvious as a browser is, a normal browser. So now all of a sudden everybody's using AI and how it's all circulating is different. And it's kind of hurting the search engines as much as it is, you know, any media company because the AI goes around them. I mean, you're talking about I'm discovering this as of November 2025. So you know how current all that is. So we are just now starting to figure out what works. And what I feel for is I'm like thinking about all these grassroots local news startups and you know, just young businesses that are trying to bring local news and keep communities informed, and then all of a sudden they get hit with this, which you cannot control. What do you do? Well, right now it's defense.

SPEAKER_00 15:44

And there's nothing being done at this point to regulate any of that.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

No, of course not. The US obviously wouldn't do it, but you know, it's it's coming from all over the world. So I'm sure there is somebody out there who's more well-versed to all this and how it all works and the impact it has. I can only tell you what I see. And when the bots came, our organic readership went down, and I noticed an instant 50% drop in referrals from Google and Apple.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

And so that has impacted our traffic big time.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

So the other concern, of course, with AI is the you know, the misinformation, right, that is now flooding our news. How do you deal with that? How do you think about that threat from where you sit?

SPEAKER_01 16:31

Well, there are good uses for AI for journalism. It can be great for research, searching, although I will tell you that we had one case where we were doing that and we noticed all these incredible rate quotes from old couriers from like 50 years ago. And I'm like thinking, and I'm like thinking, wait a minute, we weren't online back then. How the hell would they even know? How would Chat GPT know about this? And so we researched it, and of course, we discovered they were making it up to please us, I guess. You know, they were paraphrasing, but they were calling their paraphrasing quotes. So we had to like fix that, which we did. But the point was was that there's a good example of an inaccuracy that's huge, and why you don't just open up to AI and just use it for everything because you don't know what you're getting. Now you can train them, that makes it a lot better, but that's a process, and with truth and accuracy being so important, AI just isn't there as far as guaranteeing that to our readers. And it's a core reason why they will support local news media. And so it's a real slippery slope. And but I will say this if you need to paraphrase a story, you need like you do for websites. You write an 800-word story, you want a paragraph, a line or two to put on the website. It's awesome. Now we would usually just use the beginning of the story as far as using that on the website. In a lot of cases, that works for us, but it also will paraphrase a story pretty well. Doesn't make anything uh any information is just taken from the story. And it really helps us because you got to do this 30, 40 times a week, sometimes in a day, you know, as far as updating a story, or at the very least, just putting out stories online. So there are some ways it can help, and it can also help automate some of the things that you do regarding posting, so that it's not, you know, writing the stories, it's not doing anything where it's the content creator, it's just simply automating repetitive tasks that it can do extremely fast. But that too has to be watched and regulated, and that and it's very tricky. So we and our editor doesn't want to use it and doesn't. So to his credit, he rewrites every caption, every blurb we need for the website, and that's a lot of work. I mean, it adds up. You know, that could be a hundred rewrites when you turn about all the captions for every photo that goes in in a week. So it has options, but I think there are yet to be discovered all of them that are safe. Because I will tell you that we can recognize most people who have gone on AI and used it for to write their story. I mean, there's certain things that I think a lot of people are aware of that, as far as it's like there's nothing specific, there's no specific statements, everything is kind of generic. You don't have any quotes, likes to use dashes a lot. Again, I'm sure other people have other opinions and other thoughts. I'm not hardcore against it, but for journalism, you gotta pretty much be close to that hardcore part because we're kind of the last stop when it comes to all these stories.

SPEAKER_00 20:14

Right.

SPEAKER_01 20:14

And the news. We're the last stop for the news, you know.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

You don't want AI to be that. AI is gonna get better. It's gonna get better and better. It can be trained, it's still in its infancy. What do you think? You know, and you said some of the positives that it can do, some of those mundane tasks, or and it could really help a local newspaper who may, you know, be on a tighter budget, less staff, get out these stories. But what do you think only a human journalist could do that AI could never replace?

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Well, and you know, obviously you have to, you know, a journalist has to be a writer, has to be a reporter. You have to report the news. You strive for your accuracy. It's part of your profession, and you want to do your profession well. You're the one at the event, you're the one talking to the person, you're the one, the subject, and you've got to do that yourself. You've got to re-keep that one-to-one connection and write it yourself to explain what that one-to-one connection with your subject was like or subjects. And I think only a writer can do that. The AI can, if you need it to spell check or if you need it to, you know, not rewrite, but you know, there are ways to do make it kind of like almost a word doc, which is very common, obviously, to spell check. You know, I think that's fine. You know, we still need editors too to to look at this. It can't just be from the reporter straight online. It's gotta have a middle area, middle man, middle woman to, you know, review the story. So, and then this process goes on between an editor. And reporter about what happened. Did you cover this? Why is this number look so high? Those kind of questions are answered and reaffirmed and double-checked without relying on AI, which doesn't do that incredibly well. So I think the process of writing has to kind of stay that writer and editor kind of process has to stay a cohesive unit where AI can help on surrounding things, but the core, as far as the story's concerned, has to, you know, be from the writer. The writer has to be the owner. And what you're when you the more you use AI, the more you give up ownership.

SPEAKER_00 22:44

Where do you see journalism 10 years from now?

SPEAKER_01 22:48

Well, looking at what we've got now, it is scary because of our current administration being so anti-press. I think journalism and accuracy and you know being a real community informer and part of a community, I think will stand. I think that people understand real news. And I think a lot of times when you are burned enough by misinformation, you kind of start to understand the importance of all this. Now, unfortunately, a lot of people don't actually understand all those nuances. The majority of people still get their news from social media. So that's probably the worst place. And that's where all these things regarding the mix of opinion and storytelling kind of converge. And it's very difficult to monitor that a lot of times from inexperienced writers. So, you know, you've got this combination of where it's not working. So a lot will depend on how we use AI, which I think it's going to get better. I agree. I mean, you you only know it's going to get better. Now, it really hasn't proven to be worth all the incredible amounts of money that are dumping into it right now. But babies, that's the initial steps. And so, you know, I'm hoping that things will get better because people understand the importance of accuracy. They will seek out websites that news websites that do that. So I think it's going to get better. I think we're at a lull right now where it's very low, in part because we have absolutely no support. In fact, you have a a current administration that, you know, is attacking us constantly and attacking mainstream media, which is still, I believe, the one bastion of journalism as a profession and where people have standards, are trained to have standards and ethics, and you know, far from perfect, but you know, at least you've got people aware of that stuff versus others that just don't care.

SPEAKER_00 25:01

So if college student came to you today and said, I I want to pursue journalism, I want a career in journalism, what would your initial reaction be? Would you encourage them?

SPEAKER_01 25:12

Well, I mean, if they want to do it, I would always encourage them. And I'd probably say a lot of what I've explained here, especially with you know, gaining experience. I mean, you you've got to somehow get trained in this. You just can't. I think we're used to social media where you can do anything you want. You can self-publish, you can do your own podcasts, you got it all right in front of you, which I think is actually great. But I think what happens is that learning the ropes sometimes gets forgotten because it's so easy and accessible. And I think that you still gotta do that. You still gotta try to connect with other people in the business. You still gotta go to school, I think, for it and gain experience and try to mimic practices that are in the real world so that you've gotten some experience when you talk to an editor about a job. And I wouldn't worry about whether it's a nonprofit, whether it's digital. You probably wouldn't at this point look at a newspaper, but you a few still like us are still hybrids. There might be some other roles that you can play for a healthcare provider who wants stories about the people using their plans. And that tends to sometimes be more PR-ish, but it's a great place to get experience and writing and doing profiles on people. So you don't necessarily have to go through this, you know, I'm gonna do local news type thing, or I'm gonna be on television or whatever. There are a lot of other areas now, businesses that are trying to explain to people what they do and how they do it and what their customers are like, and they don't want to do it like an ad. They want to do it like they're telling a story. And so any area that you could get storytelling experience, you should consider and not kind of hone in or minimize the number of places that you'd apply to. Because I think that does happen. I want to do this, and you've got to be a little bit more open, especially to starting out.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

Do you think there are skills that matter more now for this next generation of journalists that weren't as important when you were starting out?

SPEAKER_01 27:22

Well, yes. Tech skills. I think a lot of reporters now take pictures. If you are a decent photographer, I'm just saying decent. You don't have to be, you know, award-winning photojournalist and you've gone around the world and you've done all these incredible stories. But if you have a good eye, I would nurture it because I think that more and more places are not separating those two jobs, especially smaller, smaller businesses, smaller media companies. I can't believe I'm saying that because someone who's been in photojournalism who we thought that would be heresy years ago. But the point is that there are people out there that could do both. And maybe you don't do it all the time, but I would do that and I would get tech skills on what you're doing. I would get tech skills on video. I would do editing if you could, but editing is very time consuming, and you want to focus on news gathering versus news editing, especially in the tech world, there's a big difference. Less so, I think, with journalism alone. But I think gaining those experiences early on will only make you a more valuable person to a company looking at you.

SPEAKER_00 28:38

What do you wish someone had told you earlier in your career?

SPEAKER_01 28:42

I wish they told me to learn how to write, learn how to ask questions, don't be shy, focus on the journalism part, the accuracy part, the and how important that is. I think that not that I made stuff up, it was just, you know, there's just so many things you can do to make your story better, to make your captions better. And so, and there's so many areas that make a difference. I think that the journalism part is absolutely critical. And don't take that short because I think people tend to gravitate towards the techie stuff and they know all about the tech, but they know little about what to say or what to take pictures of or what to write. And I think that that is a whole right now. I think that it is harder for us to recruit people as interns and as first year or beginning reporters because of writing skills. That's why I I wish I knew not only more about that when I was growing up, but I think I would apply it to now too. And I think the push away from that is even greater now than it was before.

SPEAKER_00 29:53

And not to use the AI in school and on their papers, because then they will never learn to write well.

SPEAKER_01 30:01

Exactly. Yeah. And there's the use of the text. Right. I should have mentioned that. But again, that's probably right now the number one thing. You know, you lose AI, you're not gonna learn to write. Right. So I don't know what to say, especially if you want to get away. I mean, the only way to get away from your piece looking like a piece of AI, which would be generic, doesn't have quotes, has opinion sprinkled in it. You know, you've just gotta, if you don't do it, you know, you learn AI how hard it is, but you're also gonna end up with a much stronger piece because you've done the work as far as, you know, knowing your subjects, getting the quotes, you know, understanding the issues, getting the numbers right, you know, all those things, AI might look great to do, and there's some research that you can help you, but it's not gonna write the story for you. I mean, it can, I shouldn't say that, but it just can't write the story for you. And I think that's gonna continue. I wonder if it will ever get to the point where you just can't tell. I I don't know. I I don't know if it will get to that. Part of the reason is, you know, AI isn't really a news gathering kind of thing, you know. And even if they're gathering news and quotes, it's all like third party. And I think that that's probably one reason why it's not reliable in certain situations. There's nothing better than that one-to-one, that you know, that one-to-one connection between a reporter and their subjects. Right. And as long as you maintain that and use the information you gain in your stories, you're gonna be ahead of a lot of people. And I think that that skill is eroding. And I think that we have to be very careful of that.

SPEAKER_00 31:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:47

Because that's the core of good reporting.

SPEAKER_00 31:50

Any last words or advice, not necessarily associated just with journalism, but for young people in general, in college, just graduating, you've had a long, successful career.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

What advice would you give? I think about that often. Well, I would just say it takes work and it takes experience. So you want to put yourself in positions where you get experience, and then when you do, you do the work it takes to, you know, create strong journalism or report, you know, stories to interact with your subjects in a way and don't be shy. I think some people tend to be a little shy, especially first getting out, and it's a little bit harder for them to connect with their subjects, which is going to impact the story. You hear about, well, maybe we should get more type A people or whatever. And you're kind of right. I mean, reporters tend to be more type A people. I mean, it's because they're not shy about reaching out and they will ask the hard questions. And so, you know, you've just got to realize that it's hard work, but you can get better with experience. But the key is just staying true to yourself, you know, and do, you know, stick to your ethics on what's the right thing to do and what your instincts say, and you'd be surprised at how far you go.

SPEAKER_00 33:12

Well, thank you so much. Thanks for the work you do and for your time today. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening to Pathfound. If anything we talked about today connected with you or gave you a new perspective, we'd love it if you subscribe, left a review, or shared the episode with someone you care about. You can also find us on Instagram at Pathfound Podcast. To explore more stories, resources, and ways to get involved, visit Keystoneetwork.org. This podcast is just one part of the journey, a Keystone Network for helping young people and anyone figuring it out as they go build meaningful futures one step at a time. A huge thank you to my podcast editor, David Strutt. You can find them on LinkedIn for helping bring these stories to life, and to Elizabeth Minor at Silvermine Creative for the beautiful artwork and web design. And if you're on your own path, navigating the unknown, making a pivot, or simply figuring it out as you go, just know you're not alone. The route may not be linear, but there's always a way forward. I'm Monica Argandonia, and I'll see you next time on Path Found.