About Alaska News

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 1,490 recorded public meetings, 3,703 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.

Our coverage comes in three layers:

• 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.
• AI Baseline. Every livestreamed meeting automatically generates draft articles, so no meeting goes uncovered.

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.

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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, Inc., an Alaska business corporation 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. Subscriptions fund the newsroom. When you tip a story, 80% goes to the people who wrote and edited it. 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.

An outside rating, too. In August 2026, Media Bias/Fact Check rated Alaska News Least Biased, with High factual reporting and High credibility. Its one reservation is our model: a high-volume, AI-assisted newsroom is new and has not yet shown over time that it avoids the errors automation can introduce. We are working to show it.

And we measure ourselves. Every day a panel of three AI models from three different companies reads our articles and those of Alaska's other newsrooms with every outlet name and byline removed, and scores them against a published rubric. The results, including where we score worst, are on the Alaska Media Bias Scorecard, alongside how our output compares with theirs and a map of where each outlet reports.

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.

Whether you want to cover your community, contribute photos, volunteer compute power, or just stay informed, we would love to have you.