The Rise of AI Local News

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When Tom Cochran and David Mortlock started kicking around ideas for a new artificial intelligence startup, they drew from their own personal experiences trying to keep up with what was happening in the community where they lived. The two longtime friends had recently moved to a small town in Maine, where city council meetings are open to the public and available to watch online, but the sheer quantity of material made it impossible to stay informed. “I just don’t have time, because I have three kids, I have a life,” said Cochran. “And this is sort of the systemic problem with communities everywhere.”

Last year, Cochran and Mortlock launched Civic Sunlight, an AI-driven service that uses large language models to comb through hours of city council meetings and then output the most important or relevant bits. Rather than sitting through meetings or sifting through videos, local community members can sign up for a free newsletter that breaks them down into particularly noteworthy topics, including brief summaries of each and time-stamped links to the actual source video—with not one word written by a human. Ten months on, the free newsletters are available for some twenty towns throughout Maine and other nearby states; Cochran says that more than a thousand people have signed up.

Civic Sunlight is just one example of a growing list of AI startups that aim to scrape public meetings to create news content. Last year, a New York–based developer named Vikram Oberoi launched citymeetings.nyc, which summarizes public proceedings on its website and in the form of a free newsletter. That same year, a California-based company called Hamlet partnered with Saratoga and Palo Alto to produce free AI-powered summaries of city council meetings, all of which are posted on its website.

The process is far from perfect. Soon after their newsletters began arriving in people’s inboxes, Cochran and Mortlock learned their AI model had a habit of coming up with facts and events that weren’t quite right, or hadn’t happened at all. (Such “hallucinations” are a known flaw of existing AI models.) “We live near a body of water called Megunticook Lake, but the AI misheard it as Megunticock Lake—which, unfortunately, made its way into a newsletter, to the great amusement of recipients,” said Cochran. Other blunders were more substantive. In November, Civic Sunlight’s newsletter for Concord, New Hampshire, stated that the city council had approved funding for two projects, Memorial Field and the Penacook Library Activity Center. As the Concord Monitor later noted, neither of those things was true. The field had merely been discussed in the meeting, and the activity center had in fact been funded years before. 

Cochran insists their model is typically about 90 to 95 percent accurate, but the early mistakes prompted a moment of reckoning. “If you have a public-facing product that is not 100 percent accurate, then you create a problem with the, like, 5 percent inaccuracies that you might have,” he said. So in the fall, he and Mortlock came up with a decidedly non-technological solution: human intervention. The two partnered with the Midcoast Villager, a new roll-up of four legacy news outlets in Maine that had recently hired Alex Seitz-Wald, a former DC politics reporter, as deputy manager. “I view it as a force multiplier, an extremely useful efficiency tool,” said Seitz-Wald, who befriended Cochran after moving to Maine following the pandemic. Midcoast Villager reporters are able to make use of Civic Sunlight’s entire database of public meeting summaries, including for a number of towns that are not yet available to the public, like the tiny island of North Haven. “We don’t have the staff to cover all those towns, never have and never will,” Seitz-Wald said. “Now we can now get a summary and then dive further into them.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Maine’s existing local news community seems receptive to the idea. In recent years, the state—like most in the nation—has experienced a severe decline in the availability of local reporting. Over the past twenty-five years, the number of journalists working in the state has fallen from 2,600 to just over 700, according to Maine’s Department of Labor. “There are hundreds if not thousands of public meetings going on in the state of Maine, and it’s impossible to go to or even just watch all of them today,” said Mark Stodder, the chairman of the board of the Maine Trust for Local News, a network of independent media outlets. “We’ve been trying to cover how many typical meetings are not covered, and trying to figure out what we can do about it.” Stodder said the Maine Trust is currently exploring the possibility of forming its own partnership with Civic Sunlight. “We’re really excited about their commitment to doing good for these communities and bringing transparency to government,” he said.

Cochran and Mortlock say they are working to expand the operation, including pilot programs in larger cities in Ohio, Massachusetts, Texas, and beyond. But getting bigger brings its own challenges, like keeping the company in touch with its original mission. “Starting in the smaller towns and in news deserts adds the most value, but it’s also the hardest way to grow a company,” Cochran said. “We want to be supportive to local communities, to increase accessibility to local government information. That’s how this all started.”

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