The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in journalism is becoming more mainstream. Personalized news feeds, AI-based investigative reporting, and automated article generation are but a few ways that AI is transforming both news content creation and consumption. Implementing AI-based technologies can be both monetarily expensive and technically complex, making its use challenging by smaller news organizations. Given this, this work explores how the use of AI in journalism will affect smaller news organizations by focusing on AI-based chatbots. This research seeks to understand how small news outlets can leverage artificial intelligence-based chatbots to help meet the information needs of audiences. This project will create an open-source chatbot prototype with functionality informed by a study of small newsroom and audience needs, and an implementation framework which will help small newsrooms implement chatbots