Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Patch, according to Warren St. John, its CEO, is “a little shop that’s trying to do this kind of antiquated thing that everybody is giving up on.” That “antiquated thing”—hyperlocal news—became less old-timey when, last spring, the company announced the rollout of AI newsletters that could reach as many as thirty thousand communities. Give the site your zip code and it would produce a daily or twice-weekly newsletter customized for your town, for a minimum readership of one subscriber. “Once we get a sign-up, then we start generating it,” St. John told me. Since then, PatchAM, as it’s known, which carries local and national advertising, has been activated in fourteen thousand communities and has accrued nearly a million subscribers. PatchAM provides the most value to places with few or zero outlets providing local news. The newsletters rely heavily on aggregation, automated event calendars, and posts from Nextdoor.…