Getting started with PubGen AI: A guide for news publishers
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PubGen AI is an affordable CMS platform that uses AI to streamline backend editorial workflows, assist reporters with story production and fact-checking against the newsroom’s archives, improve the reader experience and more.
PubGen AI’s multifunctional capabilities are a boon for publishers looking to scale their operations with limited resources.
The tool can be trained on a publication’s stories, audience details and style guide, and can take over repetitive tasks that may have previously strained a newsroom’s staff. Most significantly, it offers an AI bot that can be tailored to help with editing for style and audience interests, or writing headlines and social copy.
If you’re interested in moving to the CMS, here’s what you need to know.
Step 1: Book an intro call
Publishers should contact PubGen AI to get a walkthrough of how the product works and bring up any concerns.
During the call, you’ll be asked about workflows that are key to your business and revenue, so come ready with a list!
Step 2: Grant access to your data
You can grant access to your newsroom’s data either by offering PubGen AI direct access to your existing CMS or by exporting your content (stories, tags, media). They can also work directly with your current provider to retrieve the data.
PubGen AI does not begin billing until the new CMS is live.
Step 3: PubGen AI maps out your content
Once PubGen AI has your data, they’ll create a “mapping file” that displays your sections, tags, and categories, and generally how your archive is structured. At this point, they’ll give you suggestions for cleaning up your data before migrating.
They’ll do a final check of whether all CMS data has been sent over, or if there’s any outstanding data that was not originally set.
Step 4: Review mapped content and approve migration
Now’s your opportunity to clean up tags, sections and any duplicates. As PubGen AI founder Sho Rust says, “A migration is kind of like moving your home. It’s a nice opportunity to make sure your tags are optimized for SEO [and] that you don’t have too many of them.”
Most organizations spend 1-2 hours reviewing and approving suggestions. It’s a great idea to have a point person who can guide the newsroom through this process.
Once you give PubGen AI the thumbs up, they’ll initiate the migration, extracting everything from your logos to your house colors and typography.
Migrating the data takes approximately two weeks. In that time, anything new posted would go live in the older CMS. PubGen AI takes care of both building out and actually hosting the website.
Step 5: Run old and new systems in parallel for a week
Following the migration, your news team can start publishing as normal on the new CMS. But that’s not all — during the weeklong training period, both your old and new CMS will be live. Take this time to compare your CMS experience and make final decisions about anything important that you might want to address before making the permanent switch to PubGen.
If you haven’t done so already, you should also take this time to document your new workflows so that your newsroom can reference them during this transition phase.
Step 6: Configure your newsrooms “AI DNA”
Next, tailor the CMS to your newsroom’s style guide, values, audience, formatting and more. You can feed the AI an exact replica of the style guide you might offer any new hires.
Glenn H. Burkins, publisher of QCity Metro, said that having the AI built into the CMS made the transition “much easier” and that it’s leading to “much more adoption as we move forward.”
Read more about Burkins’ experience in our case study.
Step 7: Finalize integrations and go live
Once you’re happy with the new CMS, give PubGen AI the green light to go live.
Is PubGen AI a good fit for your organization?
PubGen AI might be a good fit for your organization if:
- You’re a newsroom with a tight budget. Its pricing starts at $499 per month and is based on total all-time story count. With the $499 tier, you’re allotted 25,000 stories. For every 50,000 stories you add to the story archive, the pricing goes up by $100 per month. If you’re a member of the Local Media Association, opt for annual billing, or add additional publications, additional discounts are available.
- You want to scale your work but have limited staff. PubGen AI is built for newsrooms that lack an IT team or technical capabilities. The platform lets news teams focus on reporting and publishing, additionally supporting them by suggesting possible questions to ask sources (based on context and newsroom coverage), summarizing documents, editing, or producing social media copy.
PubGen AI might not be the best fit for your organization if:
- Your newsroom leans heavily on video and streaming. While PubGen AI supports video via integrations, they’re still actively working toward deeper native video hosting. Rust says it’s a “high priority” for 2026, but not quite available yet.
- You’re a larger, enterprise-scale publisher with advanced IT requirements, such as SSO authentication. Most small publishers can survive without these features, but they might be must-haves for larger publications.
Pro tips and known issues
If you notice a functionality that PubGen AI doesn’t offer, the team is receptive to suggestions. Users might notice that PubGen doesn’t have as many customizable functions as other CMS, but it is open to suggestions.
Burkins said that when he made a recommendation for changing how inline images are displayed, PubGen AI quickly adopted his suggestion across the whole platform. “They absolutely listen,” Burkins says.
According to Rust, part of that agility has to do with the fact that his team built the system from the ground up. “It’s really easy to activate new features because we’re [familiar with the framework],” he says.
Security and privacy: How PubGen AI protects sensitive information
PubGen AI is designed with safeguards that take a newsroom’s heightened legal and privacy needs into consideration.
To start, Rust says that PubGen AI uses “encrypted, partner-level APIs,” meaning the data you feed into an AI is scrambled and isn’t fed back into the general AI models.
The AI is “grounded in your archives, your publication,” and no one else can access it, says Rust.
In addition, PubGen AI handles changing cookie rules, depending on your publication’s region, so the newsroom doesn’t have to track and adapt to legal changes.
Alternatives to PubGen AI for content management
None of the options below include a customizable AI agent as part of the CMS. But they may be good options for smaller digital news publishers.
Newspack is still a terrific option for small to mid-sized publishers, but its costs may not be aligned with revenue goals. Packages start at $750/month for “publications with less than $300,000 in annual revenue.”
WordPress, which Newspack is based on, may meet most needs and is an affordable open-source option, but the CMS could require more technical work if you want something more bespoke. WordPress also relies on plugins for capabilities outside of simply publishing content. While many plugins are free, some are paid and using too many could limit the speed of a website.
Ghost is another open-source publishing platform that starts at $15/month for solo blogs and newsletters. It may be too limited for a news site with higher traffic or if you want to earn revenue from ad impressions (it currently doesn’t allow display ads). For more information on Ghost, read our case study on 404 Media.
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