About Alaska News
Local news, from the source.
Public meetings deserve coverage. Alaska News covers them across Alaska, and every article names and links the source material it was written from. Where the source is a meeting we recorded, the full transcript is published alongside it.
Why We Built This
Alaska has more public meetings than journalists to sit in them. Nineteen boroughs, about 145 cities, more than 50 school districts, 229 federally recognized tribes, dozens of state boards and commissions, and the Legislature. Most of them meet on a livestream or a recording that anyone could watch and almost nobody does. A borough assembly votes on a mill rate, a planning commission rezones a block, a school board cuts a nurse position, and the record of it sits in a video nobody will ever open. The reporters who used to cover those rooms are mostly gone, and the ones left cannot be in a hundred places on a Tuesday night.
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.
That is the capacity problem this newsroom was built for. AI is a tool made by humans to amplify and extend human intelligence, and that is exactly how we use it. So far the tool has sat through 1,271 recorded public meetings, 3,114 hours of audio, and written a first draft of each one from the source. No newsroom our size could do that by hand, and no newsroom of any size in Alaska is doing it. What the tool cannot do is decide which of those rooms matter, know that the name in the transcript is the wrong Johnson, call the person who testified, or answer for the story. That part is ours, and it is the part that makes any of it journalism. 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. The platform is built for members to review and approve articles before publication, and that is how we expect trust and accuracy to compound as the community grows. Today our editors do most of that reading, and every article says whether a person reviewed it. See our AI policy.
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 source is on the page. Every article names the meeting, record or announcement it was written from, and links to it where the source is publicly reachable. Where we have the transcript, you can search it and read the passage yourself rather than taking our summary for it.
AI content is always labeled. Every AI-drafted article is marked, and one that an editor has fully reviewed names that editor, rather than borrowing the credibility of a process it did not go through. 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 Communities News platform works.
We're reader-funded, not venture-backed. Alaska News is published by Communities News LLC, an Alaska company with no investors, no outside shareholders and no parent media group, so nobody is pushing for engagement metrics or rage bait and nothing is algorithmically manipulated. When you subscribe, 50% becomes your credits and 50% funds the platform. When you read, your credits go directly to the author. Ownership and funding are spelled out on the masthead. 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.
Others have looked, too. Reporters from outside this newsroom have interviewed Walter, examined how the pipeline works and asked about the people behind it. Their articles, critical passages included, are collected in the press.
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.
Every meeting
public and on the record
Borough assemblies, school boards, tribal councils, legislative sessions, community hearings, conferences. If it was open to the public, we tried to be there.
Every minute
of audio, searchable
Every minute of audio is searchable. Find the exact moment a decision was made, a question was asked, or a concern was raised.
By name
local voices, findable
Officials, advocates, experts, and community members whose public words are indexed and searchable.
Every day
new stories from real meetings
Stories that would not exist if a reporter had to attend every meeting in person to write them.
Statewide
not just the cities
From Ketchikan to Utqiagvik, Kodiak to Fairbanks. Coverage spread across Alaska, not just the population centers.
Free
to read, always
No paywall on the news. Subscribe to support the platform and earn credits, but reading is always free.
Alaska First
Communities 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
CEO & Editor-in-Chief
Has spent his career turning Alaska's public life into stories people can see, understand and care about. A documentary filmmaker and visual storyteller, he has worked across the state with Alaska Native organizations, governments, nonprofits and businesses. Earlier work in journalism, public communications and political campaigns taught him how institutions make decisions, how messages are constructed and where the human story hides inside a public record. At Alaska News he sets editorial direction, reviews every election and campaign story before it publishes, and builds the visual pipeline that carries reporting from source documents to the people affected by them. When the publication gets something wrong, he is the human accountable for correcting it.
Grant Robinson
Journalism & Government
Trained as a journalist and spent years reporting in Knoxville and Anchorage, covering public safety, fisheries, schools and communities across Alaska. He later moved from one form of public service to another, first as the state education department's public information officer and then as deputy press secretary for Gov. Mike Dunleavy. His path reflects part of the problem Alaska News was built to address: Alaska needs more reporting than its newsroom economy has been able to sustain. Grant brings the instincts of someone who has pursued public records, questioned officials and then learned how government answers from the other side of the press room. He does not participate in Alaska News coverage of the Dunleavy administration.
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.
Lucas Brown
Product & Operations
Lee's identical twin. Co-founded and scaled TUNE to 350 people. Runs product, operations, and the conversation that produced this page. Asked an AI to research his own team, distill it down, and make it meta. You are reading the result.
Matt Larkin
Community & Strategy
Runs Dittman Research, an Alaska polling and research firm whose clients span industry, nonprofits, public agencies and political campaigns. He knows how to ask Alaskans what they think, how those answers differ across regions and when a tidy statewide number hides a more complicated state. He advises Alaska News on community and business strategy, but does not select, write, edit, review or approve its journalism.
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Get Involved
Whether you want to cover your community, contribute photos, volunteer compute power, or just stay informed, we would love to have you.