About Communities News
Every community deserves a newsroom.
Communities News, Inc. builds the software behind local newsrooms in places that lost theirs. We are based in Alaska. Our first newsroom, Alaska News, publishes local journalism every day.
Why this exists#
Public meetings still happen in towns with no newspaper. A borough assembly passes a budget. A school board closes a school. The people affected may never hear what was decided.
More than 1,800 American counties have no local news at all. That is a journalism problem before it is a technology problem. When nobody is paying attention, civic life wears away.
A newsroom that could cover those meetings at a different cost needed three things to be true at once:
- AI language models had to be good enough to do a newsroom's structural work without inventing anything. That work is transcribing, assembling evidence and drafting from checked sources.
- Running a meeting through that process had to cost cents, not dollars.
- The hard judgment calls had to be solvable by design, not by luck. That means telling a fact from a quote, a real attribution from an invented one, and a named speaker from a generic label.
By 2025, all three were true for the first time. We started building.
What we have built so far#
The platform is running. Alaska News covers borough assemblies, school boards, public hearings and statewide politics across Alaska.
Articles publish daily, every draft through an automated review first, and editors review nearly every article. Volunteers' computers process the meeting audio. Citizen journalists from across the state contribute and get bylines, and readers can tip them for their work.
How it works explains the design. It came out of several rounds of work on one question: how do you build a news pipeline that cannot put invented material on the page?
Who runs this#
Communities News, Inc. is a team of five engineers, journalists and editors based across Alaska. Geeks in the Woods, an Alaska company, built the platform. It runs together with the editorial team behind Alaska News.
The founders fund the company themselves. There is no outside venture investment.
Readers and community members support the work through monthly and annual memberships with each newsroom. Readers can also tip the people who made a story, with no account needed. 80% of a tip goes to the people named on the story: its authors, and the editors who worked on it. The rest supports the newsroom and pays the card fee.
We do not list founders or staff on this page yet. When we do, we will list them plainly. For now, the work speaks louder than an org chart, and the work is on alaskanews.com.
Rooted in Alaska#
Communities News, Inc. is an Alaska business corporation, formed on Oct. 15, 2026. Incorporating here was a decision, not only paperwork. Our first newsroom is here, and we want the company's legal home to match its civic roots.
Alaska's constitution protects privacy by name. Voters added that right in 1972, in Article 1, Section 22. It is one of the strongest privacy protections in any U.S. state constitution.
That tradition shapes the law behind our terms of service and our privacy policy. It also sets where any dispute about your data would be heard.
We collect less data than most websites do, because our business does not depend on tracking you. We use AI to make local journalism easier to find and to check. We do not use it to follow readers or to sell attention to advertisers.
If something does go wrong with how we handle your data, our privacy promises will be read in a state with a long court record of taking privacy seriously. That is not a claim that we are better than everyone else. It is a choice about the legal standards we want to be held to.
Local. Transparent. Privacy-respecting. Accountable. That is the brand, and the legal structure is there to make it real.
Where this is going#
Alaska News is the proof that this works. The platform is built to grow to any community where a serious editorial team wants to run it. We are early in that growth.
We are growing on purpose, and slowly. The platform's value is the standards built into it, and those standards only hold if every newsroom on the platform shares them.
If you run a community newsroom, or are thinking about starting one, we want to talk. If you write about the local news problem, reach out. The same goes if you fund local journalism.
Two practical notes#
On AI. The platform uses AI language models heavily, and we say so openly. How it works describes what the AI does at each step and what it never decides. We do not believe AI replaces journalism. So the editorial gate is built into the system, not left to discretion. Every AI draft passes an automated review before it can publish, editors review nearly every article, and no article claims a review that did not happen.
On open source. The newsroom platform itself is closed-source. Two pieces are open: the Local News API skill for AI agents, and Bearing Diligence. Our public project page is github.com/news-community/public, where stars, public issues and future open-source pieces go. If you are interested in licensing or in something we might open-source, contact us.