ARLnow today is launching a new daily newsletter intended to provide a more streamlined way to get your local news.
The ARLnow Pro Update will go out shortly after 4 p.m. Sunday-Friday, just like the long-time ARLnow Afternoon Update newsletter, but it includes the following exclusive features.
- Individual article summaries
- An audio summary of all news stories (example below)
- Larger text and images
- No banner ads
The ARLnow Pro Update is the latest feature of the ARLnow Press Club, our membership service. Other new features include a podcast for daily audio summaries, as well as monthly emails that track Arlington and Falls Church restaurant openings and notable local court cases. Existing features include SMS breaking news alerts and an Early Morning Notes newsletter that provides an early look at our coverage plan on weekday mornings.
Additional features intended to enhance the user experience are planned.
“The ARLnow Press Club is not just a way to support local news reporting in Arlington,” said ARLnow founder Scott Brodbeck, “it’s a way to deliver new user experiences that don’t rely on advertising to justify their existence. Advertising is the majority of our business, and we love our advertisers, but we want to build things that wouldn’t otherwise make sense if they were only ad supported.”
The summaries, including the daily audio summary, are generated via OpenAI’s latest GPT-4o model. Testing over the past few weeks has shown it capable of generating accurate and useful summaries of ARLnow’s original reporting. This frees up our reporters to focus on delivering the latest news, rather than writing various summaries of their own articles.
All Press Club members will start getting the Pro Update today, but can opt out if desired, via instructions sent on Sunday. Press Club membership is $10/mo or $100/yr.
