A platform for community newsrooms in places legacy media left behind.
Honest. Local. Now.
The first newsroom is live at alaskanews.com. The platform behind it — and the parent surface for newsrooms in the places legacy media has abandoned — is communities.news.
Humans and AI agents alike welcome. This repo is the public-facing surface for the project. The platform code itself is private, but stars, general issues, feature requests, and contributions to any open-sourced pieces all land here.
If you support what we're building, give the repo a star — it's the simplest signal that this kind of journalism matters.
Over 1,800 counties in America have zero local news. Public meetings happen, decisions get made, and nobody covers them because nobody can afford to. The legacy media cost structure does not work at the grain of a borough assembly meeting in Cordova or a school board hearing in Nome.
News Community is a different cost structure. LLMs do the structural work that used to need a reporter at every meeting (transcribing audio, surfacing patterns, drafting against a verified evidence pool). A small editorial team, supplemented by community contributors, does the judgment work. The result is more coverage of more meetings, with the same standards of accuracy and attribution as legacy journalism, at a cost that actually closes for towns that legacy media abandoned.
Live in Alaska today. Designed to expand to any community that wants it.
- Transparency. Every article shows its source recordings, evidence pool, and edit history. The work is auditable end to end.
- Accuracy. AI drafts; humans verify. Every claim traces back to source. No hallucinated facts, no anonymous-sourced narrative shortcuts.
- Accessibility. No paywall, no signup required to read. Ever.
- Privacy. Alaska-incorporated and Alaska-governed. We collect less data than the ad-tech default because our business model does not depend on surveillance.
Read the news for free at alaskanews.com. No paywall, no signup required to read, ever. If you want to follow specific topics, locations, or speakers, create a free account.
If you know your community and want to cover the meetings, decisions, and stories that matter, write for News Community. You work from AI-generated transcripts and drafts, get peer reviewed by your community, and earn credits when readers value your work.
The platform processes audio and video from public meetings on volunteer computers running our desktop app. If you have a Mac or PC that's online a lot and you want to help cover meetings without writing a word, this is the path.
Apply to be a compute volunteer
Reader credits flow directly to the journalists whose work you value. No subscription required to read, but if you want to support local coverage, credits are how that happens.
Sign up at alaskanews.com/signup and click any author's photo to send credits.
If you live somewhere legacy media has abandoned and you want a newsroom there too, that's the long-term direction of the project. Alaska is the first; others can follow.
If you find a bug, have a feature idea, or want to flag something about the platform: open an issue here.
This is the public-facing repo for project-level feedback. All bug reports, feature requests, and general project discussion belong here.
- communities.news — the platform behind the newsrooms
- alaskanews.com — the first newsroom, live today
- About the project — vision, principles, who we are
- How it works — what happens between a meeting and an article
The platform code itself is closed-source today. This public repo is where any pieces extracted as open-source would land — that's deferred for now, but on the roadmap as the project matures.
In the meantime, this repo is the public-facing surface: stars, issues, feature requests, and project-level discussion.
- Apply as a journalist: alaskanews.com/journalist
- Apply as a compute volunteer: alaskanews.com/worker/apply
- General contact: communities.news/contact
Community News LLC, built by Geeks in the Woods in Anchorage, Alaska.
License terms TBD per any pieces extracted to this public repo. The platform code itself is closed-source.