About Alaska News
Local news, from the source.
Public meetings deserve coverage. Alaska News covers them across Alaska, and every claim in every article links back to the exact moment it was said in the original source.
Why We Built This
Most public meetings in Alaska are never covered by a journalist. Borough assemblies, school boards, tribal councils, statewide legislative sessions, public hearings — they happen, decisions get made, and the people they affect have no easy way to know what was decided. Meanwhile most of those meetings are livestreamed, transcribed, or entered into a public record. Nobody is turning any of it into journalism.
The cost is more than informational. Corruption flourishes in a news vacuum. When nobody covers what governments and organizations are doing day to day, accountability disappears.
We built Community News to close that gap. AI handles the volume work: attending meetings, transcribing, tracking filings, drafting recaps. Humans add what matters most. Editorial judgment. Local context. The investigative work AI cannot do. Alaska News is the first live newsroom on the platform.
How It Works
Every article flows through three tiers:
- AI Baseline. Every livestreamed meeting automatically generates draft articles, so no meeting goes uncovered.
- Community Drafts. Any community member can write articles directly from the transcript.
- Peer Review. Members review and approve articles before publication. This is how trust and accuracy compound.
Every article covers meetings from multiple angles: detailed recaps of individual meetings, patterns that emerge over time, and broader context comparing local decisions to state and national trends.
Why You Can Trust Us
The transcript is verifiable proof. Every article links back to specific transcript segments from the original meeting. Click any claim, hear the exact moment it was said. This level of transparency is something traditional media has never been able to offer.
AI content is always labeled. Every AI-drafted article is clearly marked and must pass community peer review before publication. We do not hide that AI helps us. We are transparent about it because the transparency is what makes the speed honest. For the full pipeline (every stage, every model, every guard against fabrication), see how the Community News platform works.
We're community-owned, not venture-backed. No investors pushing for engagement metrics or rage bait. No algorithmic manipulation. When you subscribe, 50% becomes your credits and 50% funds the platform. When you read, your credits go directly to the author. The entity behind the platform is Community News LLC, registered in Alaska — see terms and privacy.
We build in public. The platform code is private today, but we maintain a public-facing repo for general issues, feedback, and open-source pieces we may extract over time. If you spot an error in any article, let us know. We correct it.
What We've Covered
You couldn't make it to the meeting. Now you can still read what happened, hear what was said, and find out what it means.
Cumulative since launch.
940+
public meetings and events covered
Borough assemblies, school boards, tribal councils, legislative sessions, community hearings, conferences. If it was open to the public, we tried to be there.
1,575
hours of recordings transcribed
Every minute of audio is searchable. Find the exact moment a decision was made, a question was asked, or a concern was raised.
388
local voices now findable by name
Officials, advocates, experts, and community members whose public words are indexed and searchable.
824
stories published
Stories that would not exist if a reporter had to attend every meeting in person to write them.
60+
places across Alaska covered
From Ketchikan to Utqiagvik, Kodiak to Fairbanks. Coverage spread across the state, not just the cities.
Free
to read, always
No paywall on the news. Subscribe to support the platform and earn credits, but reading is always free.
Alaska First
Community News is built by a team of five in Anchorage, Alaska. We started here because Alaska is one of the most underserved media markets in the country, and because we believe world-class technology companies can be built from anywhere.
Alaska's rural communities have been black boxes on purpose. In Utqiaġvik on the North Slope, or villages across the Aleutians and the Northwest, the only way to follow local government has been to fly there or catch the broadcast live. Once the platform works for Anchorage and the rail belt, the same infrastructure can bring coverage to places that have gone without it for decades.
Alaska News is the first production launch: one domain, one statewide newsroom, and one proof point for a platform designed to support many communities and many local news domains over time.
The Team
Cale Green
Video & Visual Pipeline
Knows how to point a camera at Alaska and make you care. Building the pipeline that turns written articles into short-form video. The organic growth engine.
Matt Larkin
Community & Strategy
Understands what Alaskans think before they think it. Runs the polling firm that has called every major Alaska race correctly for over fifty years. The kind of community insight you cannot train a model on. We tried.
Grant Robinson
Journalism & Government
Has done the job this platform is trying to scale. Covered Alaska news, then moved to the other side of the press room. Brings the editorial instinct no language model has figured out yet: knowing which story actually matters.
Lee Brown
Engineering & Architecture
Lucas's identical twin. Co-founded and scaled TUNE to 350 people, then moved to Alaska to build from scratch again. Wrote the pipeline, the services, the infrastructure. One of the strongest human-AI engineering collaborators we know. The AI agents fight over who gets to pair with him.
Developed by Geeks in the Woods
The Community News platform was developed by Geeks in the Woods, a software engineering factory based in Alaska.
Get Involved
Whether you want to cover your community, contribute photos, volunteer compute power, or just stay informed, we would love to have you.
