About Communities News
Every community deserves a newsroom.
Communities News LLC is the company behind the platform that powers community newsrooms in places legacy media abandoned. We are based in Alaska, and our first newsroom is Alaska News, live and producing local journalism today.
Why this exists
The local news desert is a journalism problem before it is a technology problem. Over 1,800 American counties have no local news. Public meetings happen, decisions get made, and the people they affect have no way to know what was decided. Civic life corrodes in the absence of attention.
Three things had to be true at the same time for a different cost structure to be possible:
- Large language models had to be good enough to do the structural newsroom work (transcription, evidence assembly, drafting against verified inputs) without producing fabrications that would corrupt the journalism.
- The cost per token had to fall low enough that running a meeting through the pipeline costs cents, not dollars.
- The interpretive problems (distinguishing a fact from a quote, an attribution from a hallucination, a speaker from a generic label) had to be solvable structurally, not just probabilistically.
By 2025 those three were true at the same time for the first time. We started building.
What we have built so far
The platform is operational. Alaska News covers borough assembly meetings, school board sessions, public hearings, and statewide political events across Alaska. Articles publish daily after editorial review. The compute that processes the audio runs on volunteer machines. Citizen journalists from communities across the state contribute, receive bylines, and earn reader-funded credits routed to them by subscribers who read their work.
The architecture (described in How it works) is the result of several iterations on the same core question: how do you build a journalism pipeline that is structurally incapable of putting fabricated material on the page?
Who runs this
Communities News LLC is a team of five engineers, journalists, and editors based across Alaska. The platform was built by Geeks in the Woods (Alaska) and runs in collaboration with the editorial team that operates Alaska News.
Communities News LLC is bootstrapped by its founders, with no outside venture investment. The platform is supported by readers and community members through monthly and annual memberships at the newsroom level. Subscription revenue is split between the platform and reader credits that flow directly to the authors whose work the subscriber reads.
We do not list founders or staff on this page yet. When we do, we will list them clearly. For now, the work speaks louder than the org chart, and the work is on alaskanews.news.
Rooted in Alaska
Communities News LLC is incorporated in Alaska. That is a position, not paperwork. We chose Alaska because our first newsroom is here, but also because we want the company's legal home to match its civic roots.
Alaska's constitution (Article 1, Section 22, added by voter amendment in 1972) protects privacy as an enumerated right, which is one of the strongest constitutional privacy protections in any US state. That tradition shapes the law that governs our terms of service, our privacy policy, and the venue where any dispute about our handling of your data would be heard. We collect less data than the ad-tech default because our business model does not depend on surveillance. We use AI to make local journalism more available and verifiable, not to track readers or trade attention for ads.
If something does go wrong with how we handle your data, the privacy commitments we make are interpreted through a state with a long judicial record of taking privacy seriously. That is not a marketing claim about being better than everyone else. It is a deliberate choice about the legal culture under which the company operates and the standards we want to be held to.
Local. Transparent. Privacy-respecting. Accountable. That is the brand, and the legal structure exists to make it real.
Where this is going
The Alaska News newsroom is the proof of concept. The platform is designed to expand to any community where a serious editorial team wants to bring it to operation. We are early in that expansion. We are deliberate about it because the platform's value is the standards baked into the pipeline, and the standards only hold if every newsroom on the platform shares them.
If you operate or are considering operating a community newsroom, we want to talk. If you cover the local-news problem and want to write about how this works, reach out. If you fund local journalism, the same.
Two practical notes
On the AI question. The platform uses language models extensively. We are not subtle about it; the How it works page describes exactly which models do which jobs. We also do not believe AI replaces journalism, and we have built the platform so the editorial gate is structural rather than discretionary. Every published article goes through human review.
On the open-source question. The platform itself is closed-source. The public-facing project surface is at github.com/news-community/public. Stars, public issues, and any pieces we eventually extract for open-source release land there. If you have a specific interest in licensing or in pieces we might open-source, contact us.