6AM City acquires Good Daily’s network of more than 350 AI-generated local newsletters

On Monday, the newsletter company 6AM City announced it had purchased Good Daily, a network of AI-generated local newsletters aimed at hundreds of small towns and cities across the U.S.

In January, I uncovered Good Daily, which in less than a year had quietly expanded to more than 350 towns and cities. At the time, each newsletter included fabricated testimonials and portrayed itself as being run by local community members. I confirmed the network was built and operated by a single engineer, Matthew Henderson, based in New York City.

Henderson uses generative AI to produce automated newsletters for each town, aggregating articles from local publishers and producing short blurbs summarizing them. These summaries run alongside event promotions and advertisements from local and national buyers. This week, each of those newsletters, including Good Day Fort Collins, Daily Macon, and Today in Virginia Beach, was rebranded with the 6AM City logo.

The deal is the latest in a series of generative AI-fueled expansions by local newsletter companies. In January, Axios Local partnered with OpenAI to integrate generative AI tools into its editorial workflow and launch in four new cities. In April, I covered Patch’s decision to lay off dozens of contract newsletter curators and launch AI-generated newsletters in more than 30,000 communities across the U.S.

Founded in 2016 as a community newsletter for Greenville, S.C., 6AM City has since launched newsletters in 31 cities across the country. With over 100 employees, its strongest presence is in the Southeast. All its cities currently have dedicated editorial staff and lean toward lifestyle and civic news, events, and “easy reads.” With the addition of Good Daily’s AI-generated newsletters, the company will now reach more than 400 cities in all 50 states. The acquisition also increases 6AM City’s overall subscriber count by more than 500,000.

“We got to learn that the person behind Good Daily and the technology behind it were really of meaningful value for us, and how we scale our business,” said Ryan Heafy, the co-founder and COO of 6AM City. Heafy said 6AM City will continue to operate its “core” newsletters with human editors, but will treat Good Daily’s AI-generated newsletters as “seed markets.”

“We’re planting a seed in these cities that will allow us to establish great domain health, a positive reputation, and a list of subscribers that can then transition,” said Heafy. If any of those markets build up enough of an audience or revenue potential, he said, they’ll receive dedicated editorial staff. For example, 6AM City recently launched new “core markets” in Northern Virginia; Orlando, Florida; and Knoxville, Tennessee.

“Some of the operational efficiency that [Henderson] has created — the stuff that’s not obvious to the consumer — was of material interest to us,” said Heafy. As part of the deal, Henderson will become 6AM City’s VP of engineering.

6AM City was in the process of building a suite of AI newsletter products internally when they approached Henderson earlier this year. “He is a humongous asset,” said Heafy. “We’ve been spending more money than we should with third-party groups on the outside to build the tech infrastructure.” Henderson did not respond to requests for comment.

Heafy acknowledged the criticisms leveled against Henderson and Good Daily by the news publishing industry.

In March, the News/Media Alliance, a trade association of over 2,200 publishers from across the U.S. and Canada, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Henderson. The letter expressed concern about Good Daily’s scraping practices and its potential lack of compliance with robot.txt protocols and circumvention of paywalls. “For Good Daily to operate as a well-founded and compliant news aggregator, it must respect our member publishers’ right to refuse having their data and other information scraped, indexed, or otherwise used,” wrote News/Media Alliance president Danielle Coffey in the letter.

“I think most media entities get cease-and-desist letters or similar types of complaints all the time. That’s kind of a standard course of business,” said Heafy. “If you’re not rattling the cages, then you’re not innovating.” Heafy clarified that 6AM City was aware of the complaint before its acquisition but is not currently in touch with the News/Media Alliance about its demands.

A spokesperson for the News/Media Alliance told me that its members “stand by the letter we sent in March.”

“People should probably give it a little bit of time to let us ingest the product, make the changes, see where it lands here,” said Heafy. “I think people will be really impressed with the product evolution and the response to prior critics.”

Heafy himself was one such critic. Before we ran our January story, Heafy, who had somehow heard about my reporting, contacted me to comment on Good Daily. At the time, he called Good Daily a “massive scam” and “almost fraud.” In particular, he took issue with fake testimonials and false audience numbers that had been published on Good Daily’s sign-up and advertising pages and told me Good Daily was “preying on small local businesses” by how it courted ad buyers in rural and smaller urban markets.

Now, Heafy says he’s changed his mind. He also said 6AM City and Henderson have been working together to address his initial concerns about Good Daily’s operational ethics.

“You don’t want to write something off because it doesn’t fit your mold. The product at its core, the infrastructure and architecture and the person, is awesome, if you can clean it up and get it where it needs to be,” Heafy told me. “I’m not so concerned about the past. [Henderson] was testing and learning. Every media company makes missteps along the way.”

Over the next two months, 6AM City will make some changes to Good Daily’s newsletters to bring them in line with its own “editorial, ethical, and advertising standards.” That includes scrapping its crime and politics news aggregation sections to foreground lifestyle and community events. Heafy said they will aggregate content from fewer local news publications overall and will instead link directly to social media pages and websites run by community organizations and local businesses. 6AM City’s advertising team will take over sales and client accounts and periodically run “scalable content” produced in-house, including college rankings.

For now, Good Daily’s newsletters will continue to scrape local news publisher websites and publish content without human editorial review. The newsletter Good Day Fort Collins, for example, pulls stories regularly from regional dailies like The Coloradoan and the Loveland Reporter-Herald to fill its round-ups. It will do so while targeting advertisers in the same local market.

This story has been updated to correct the founding year of 6AM City and the number of newsletters it has launched.