AI USE CASE
Local News Draft from Council Documents
Automatically drafts neutral news articles from council meeting packs and planning notices for small local outlets.
What it is
An LLM-based pipeline ingests council agendas, minutes, and planning notices, then generates structured draft articles with inline citations ready for editorial review. The journalist reviews, adjusts tone, and publishes, AI handles the first draft.
Data you need
Access to publicly available council meeting packs, agendas, minutes, and planning notices in PDF or web format.
Required systems
- none
Why it works
- Journalist always reviews every AI draft before publication and treats it as a starting point, not a finished product.
- Prompt templates are tuned to the outlet's editorial style and regularly updated as council document formats evolve.
- A simple citation-verification step is built into the workflow to cross-check all facts against source documents.
- The tool is scoped narrowly to factual summary drafts, not opinion or investigative content, where hallucination risk is highest.
How this goes wrong
- LLM fabricates or misattributes quotes or facts from council documents, causing published errors that damage editorial credibility.
- Journalist skips meaningful review assuming AI output is accurate, resulting in inaccurate or biased articles going live unchecked.
- Council document formats change (e.g., new PDF layouts or portals) and the ingestion pipeline breaks silently without alerting the journalist.
- Generated articles sound generic or bureaucratic, failing to match the outlet's local voice and reducing reader engagement.
When NOT to do this
Don't deploy this if the outlet has no editorial review process in place, a solo journalist publishing AI drafts without fact-checking will eventually print a council document misreading as news, destroying local trust.
Example vendors
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