QCity Metro switched to an AI CMS to cut costs. The tool also expanded what the small staff could do.
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Charlotte, N.C.-based newsroom QCity Metro was not shopping around for a new publishing platform when it adopted the AI-driven CMS, PubGen AI.
“I absolutely love[d] Newspack, I think it’s a great system,” QCity Metro founder and publisher, Glenn H. Burkins, says of its former CMS.
But managing overhead costs is essential for small publishers like QCity Metro — and replacing its pricey CMS became an acute need after the 2024 election, when the publisher lost a significant number of advertisers.
“We saw a lot of our advertisers step back because of the administration’s anti-DEI initiatives. We simply needed to save some money,” says Burkins.
For QCity Metro, PubGen AI not only saves money, it also offers access to efficient, AI-driven functions, like copyediting, newsletter generation and more.
Here’s why the tool is a right fit for QCity Metro.
Three reasons PubGen AI works
- High speed: PubGen AI is a fast-loading platform thanks to its use of Next.js and React, enhanced by server-side rendering. This is different than how Ghost or WordPress-based content management systems work.
- Modest cost: While significantly more affordable (as of 2026), PubGen AI offers a publisher-friendly interface that’s constantly adding new features.
- Automated workflows: PubGen AI’s prompts can be used to support repetitive tasks such as headline generation, newsletter formatting and copyediting.
Newsroom Overview
Founded in 2008, QCity Metro is a local, digital-only newsroom that serves Charlotte’s Black community. Its audience is 90% Black and 10% white, and has a 60/40 split between female and male readers.
Serving this readership is a lean team of freelance reporters and five full-time employees, as well as the folks behind the Knight BloomLab initiative, a joint effort by Local Media Association and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to support a cohort of Black-owned local media outlets.
BloomLab Director of Technology Apryl Pilolli helped identify PubGen AI as an option. She says that PubGen AI is compatible with many small publishers’ unique criteria, including their need to load large, historical archives; scale work with limited staff; and importantly, to cut costs without sacrificing their CMS’ usability.
While Pilolli says her team is “platform-agnostic” and doesn’t recommend that all small publishers switch to PubGen AI, she says that for many who fit this profile, the benefits of its AI tools are impossible to ignore. To date, she’s helped BloomLab members Dallas Examiner, Sacramento Observer, and QCity Metro migrate their systems to PubGen AI.
“We have to be real. We already wear a million hats, we’re barely making the revenue that we need to, and the burnout is real. So we need to use AI to be more effective in what we’re doing,” Pilolli says.
Problem: Small publisher with a reduced budget
The primary driving force behind QCity Metro’s switch to PubGenAI was cost.
The newsroom’s advertiser downturn led to a spending crunch, and Newspack’s high platform fees felt unsustainable.
Pilolli sought an option that addressed today’s newsroom budgets. To that end, adopting PubGen AI is estimated to save QCity Metro about $1,000 a month (at a special rate for Local Media Association members), and an LMA technology grant will cover the first couple years of their subscription.
“We need to be where all of our audiences are, not just on our own website. Figuring out how we could invest in those other platforms, but then have a sustainable price for our website was one of the key things I [was] looking for,” Pilolli says.
It made a huge difference for Burkins. “Between [the grant] and what we will eventually save monthly, that was fairly significant to us.”
And while the cost savings were a big impetus to migrate, the platform’s built-in AI workflows and features also addressed another challenge: The newsroom’s reality of time and resources.
Solution: An affordable CMS with intentional AI tools
PubGen AI is an AI-powered content management system that automates repetitive editorial workflows such as generating social media posts or headlines and editing written and visual content. It also comes with a bespoke AI bot that users can train to tackle miscellaneous editorial tasks.
Pilolli, who says it took her “2.5 to 3 years” of vetting PubGen AI before submitting her recommendation, says that PubGen founder Sho Rust’s news background helped convince her of its potential.
Rust’s family owns a network of local newspapers, including the Southeast Missourian and The Osceola Times in Arkansas. Rust is also the Local Media Association’s board director. Before launching PubGen AI, he worked with Boston Consulting Group’s Digital Ventures.
“You have to have some understanding of what this ecosystem looks like,” says Pilolli.
For QCity Metro, the improvements have been significant.
PubGen AI’s heap of new features have streamlined the newsroom. Via a custom prompt, Burkins built a copy editor to fix typos and grammar and another to transform stories into newsletter text.
Pilolli says PubGen AI’s quick load times, made possible by its use of “one of the fastest hosting providers” out there, is a better experience for users and advertisers.
“At the end of the day, the users want to get to your content as fast as possible,” Pilolli says. “PubGen is really optimizing to make the sites load faster and get the content to the users.”
Impact: Faster load times, cleaner copy and a smaller bill
In addition to the above benefits, Burkins’ AI prompts have brought uniformity and polish to their newsletter.
“Through PubGen, we’ve been able to give our newsletter a consistent voice throughout,” he says.
As for the typos that his readers once called him out on, Burkins says, “I’m happy to say — knock on wood — that those little sloppy things, they’re practically nonexistent.”
Burkins mentions that PubGen AI’s copy editing capability goes beyond simple grammar fixes: “As part of the migration, we had to tell PubGen about QCity Metro and our audiences. So it now knows that we are a Black-led publication that serves a Black audience,” says Burkins.
“The copy editing prompt I wrote now offers tips on phrasing that our readers might find insensitive or off-point. It also tells us if we fail to include community voices or fail to consider certain angles — all based on our library of content.”
Finally, Pilolli says that faster load times have had a net positive effect on audience engagement and ad impressions.
“With all of our publishers, even as their traffic declines, we’ve seen their ad impressions go up because the people are spending more time on the site and reading more content,” Pilolli says.
While Burkins says he’s still “learning all of [PubGen’s] capabilities,” he says he’s becoming a “big fan.”
Security and privacy: A closed AI system
Burkins admits that some of the people on his team, himself included, were a bit reluctant to incorporate AI into their workflow, partly due to AI’s reputation for delivering misinformation.
But PubGen AI’s privacy features quickly convinced him.
“What I liked about PubGen is that it’s a closed system — all of our AI functions are limited to our content. If a reader uses our chatbot, it’s not going to pull in information from the internet, it’s going to pull strictly from the stories that we’ve published,” Burkins says.
Pilolli adds that none of the newsroom’s data is shared back with any of the AI models the platform uses — it stays local to each newsroom.
For newsrooms that don’t want to use the CMS’ AI co-pilot features that can support content editing and generation, there’s also the option to turn them off and set boundaries for what site sections can use the AI features. This ability allows publishers to either slowly experiment with different tools and ease their way into the system’s AI capabilities, or never turn them on at all.
The verdict: Resource-strained news operations stand to benefit
For QCity Metro, the move to PubGen AI made a lot of sense. It saved them money, leveraged automation to support their workflows and helped their small team do more — and on more platforms.
The resulting website’s performance was boosted, too. Making audiences more likely to engage with the journalism, and advertisers more likely to pay for placement.
According to Burkins, PubGen AI has been very receptive to feature recommendations, suggesting that this is a tool that can evolve with the newsroom. It also doesn’t hurt that the CMS creator’s experience in the news publishing business means PubGen AI is tuned into the needs of small publishers in this space.
Pricing for PubGen AI starts at $499 per month and is based on total all-time story count. With the $499 tier, publishers are allotted 25,000 stories. Find more pricing details in our getting started guide on the CMS.
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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