How It Works
Communities News powers local newsrooms with free reading and verifiable sources. Subscribers fund the newsroom, and any reader can tip the people who made a story.
See how it works ↓212 Counties Have No Local News. Another 1,525 Have One.
212 US counties have no local news source at all, and another 1,525 rely on a single outlet, usually a weekly paper. Together that is roughly 50 million Americans with limited or no access to local news. Traditional newsrooms cost $300K-$600K per year to operate in a single market. That math doesn't work for small communities. A community newsroom changes it: AI covers the record, so local journalists spend their time reporting.
The paradox: most of these communities already livestream their government meetings. The information is public. Nobody is turning it into journalism.
$300K+
Traditional newsroom, one market
$25K
Community newsroom: AI covers the record, people report
Tip the People Who Made a Story
Every story has a Tip button under it. You pay in dollars, and most of it goes to the people who wrote and edited that story.
$5 to $500
per tip
Paid by card through Stripe
80%
to the people who made it
Its human authors and the editors who edited it
No account
needed to tip
Anyone reading can tip
You Choose How to Participate
Several ways to take part. Nobody loses access.
Journalist
Write and edit articles. Readers can tip your stories.
- • AI starts the draft from meeting transcripts; you bring the local knowledge, the calls and the judgment
- • When a reader tips a story you wrote or edited, 80% of the tip goes to the people who made it
- • AI drafts get an automated review before they publish, and community editors review and edit articles. How review works
Compute Volunteer
Help transcribe public meetings.
- • Run a desktop app (Windows / macOS / Linux) that processes meeting videos in the background
- • Need: a regular computer, broadband, ~5GB free storage. Your spare cycles do the work
- • Each job your computer finishes turns a public meeting into a transcript
Subscribe
Monthly or yearly plan. Always ad-free.
- • Browse and search every meeting transcript
- • Premium audio narration
- • Funds the newsroom. Higher plans give it more support
Read Free
Read everything free.
- • Full content always available, paywall-free
- • No ads today. If advertising ever comes, subscribers will not see it
- • You never lose access to a single article
You can pick either, both, or neither. Some people just read; some write articles, some volunteer compute, some do both. None depend on each other.
What AI Does. What Humans Do.
AI handles the volume work that has been silently skipped for decades. Human journalists do what AI cannot.
AI handles
- • Sitting through six-hour public meetings
- • Recapping assembly, council, and committee decisions
- • Tracking APOC filings and campaign finance reports
- • Monitoring agency rules, court actions, corporate filings
- • Surfacing patterns across hundreds of sources
Humans do
- • Cultivating sources and following leads
- • Investigative work that takes months of judgment
- • Reading the room at a campaign event or hearing
- • Asking the hard question in person
- • Deciding which story actually matters
Most people who went to journalism school did not go there to sit through six-hour budget hearings. AI frees them for the work only they can do.
Every Article Names Its Source
Every article names the meeting, record or announcement it was written from, and links to it where that source is publicly reachable. Where we have the transcript you can search it and read the passage yourself. Do not take our word for it, check for yourself. AI provides baseline coverage. Community members add depth and local knowledge.
We check the finished articles, too. A panel of three AI models from three companies scores our coverage and that of Alaska's other newsrooms with outlet names removed, and every result is published on the Alaska Media Bias Scorecard.
“I couldn't remember who said it. I couldn't remember what meeting it happened in. I found it anyway. That's super valuable.”
Decisions, votes, key quotes from each meeting
Recurring themes and shifting coalitions across meetings
How local decisions compare to state and national trends
Transparent Revenue. No Hidden Agenda.
No venture capital. No algorithmic rage bait. Just local journalism that pays the people who do the work.
When You Tip
80% to the people who made it
The company keeps 20% and pays the card fee out of it. The rest goes to the story's human authors and the editors who edited it. If no person wrote or edited the story, the newsroom keeps the tip.
When You Subscribe
It funds the newsroom
Your plan pays for the reporting, the servers, the AI and the team. It also unlocks transcripts and premium audio.
Built by the Community
Real numbers from a real platform. Updated every 10 minutes.
1,490
meetings transcribed
6,985
articles published
3,703
hours of audio processed
6
contributors this week
Have a Story We Should Cover?
You don't need an account to send a tip. Here's what happens after you submit:
1. A human reads it
Every tip lands in an editor review queue. No auto-publishing, no AI deciding what gets covered. A community editor reads what you sent.
2. You can stay anonymous
Choose “send anonymously” and we keep no name, email or Signal for the tip, and a signed-in tip is not linked to your account. Or let an editor contact you privately; your name is published only if you say so. A code shown after sending lets you read replies either way. A scrambled network address is kept 48 hours to limit abuse, then deleted.
3. You can attach evidence
Photos, audio and video, up to five files. We strip location and other hidden details from them before anyone sees them. Documents can’t be attached yet: link to one in your tip.
Tips help us find the stories happening between meetings. A transcript cannot surface those on its own.
Stay Informed. Support What Matters.
Free, permanent access to local news you can trust, so you can go about your daily life from a better informed position.
No paywall, ever. Open source. Meet the team behind it →