cranberrytownship.news is an independent, AI-assisted civic journalism project covering Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania (Butler County, near Pittsburgh, pop. ~35,000). We publish news articles, investigative features, and meeting coverage drawn entirely from public records, official meeting transcripts, and government documents.
Local journalism is disappearing. Cranberry Township, like thousands of communities across America, lacks dedicated reporters covering local government. Board meetings go unattended. Budget decisions, zoning fights, and development debates happen with minimal public scrutiny.
cranberrytownship.news exists to fill that gap. We use AI to process what no single reporter could: every minute of every public meeting, cross-referenced against municipal code, budget documents, and historical records. The result is comprehensive, sourced coverage that links every claim to a timestamp in the public record.
Source material: All content originates from public records. Meeting videos are downloaded from the township's public video archive, transcribed using AI speech recognition (Deepgram Nova 3), and processed into searchable text with speaker identification.
Article generation: Articles are drafted by AI language models (Anthropic Claude and others) using the full meeting transcript as source material, supplemented by cross-references to related meetings, municipal code, and publicly available government records. Every quoted statement links directly to the video timestamp where it was spoken.
Human editorial oversight: All articles are reviewed by a human editor before publication. The editor verifies factual claims against source transcripts, checks quote accuracy, and ensures fair representation of all parties. Articles may be revised or withheld if they do not meet our standards.
Transparency: Every article identifies its AI model in the metadata. Every quote includes a link to the source transcript and video timestamp so readers can verify claims in context. We believe radical transparency is the only ethical way to publish AI-assisted journalism.
We cover the following Cranberry Township-area government bodies:
cranberrytownship.news is an independent news project. It is not affiliated with Cranberry Township, any political party, or any commercial interest.
For questions, corrections, or tips: Contact us.
Our searchable transcript archive contains 0 meeting transcripts spanning 61 meetings. All transcripts are derived from public meeting videos and are freely searchable via our Ask Cranberry tool.