About Salem Keizer News

I'm Andrew, and this is the story behind Salem Keizer News.

I really love journalism. If it weren’t so depressing I’d admit that my professional life likely peaked in my 20s, when I was a reporter/photographer/editor/designer for a weekly newspaper in NY. I got to cover local government. And I was immediately floored by how much happened in local politics that never went mentioned outside of very small, very influential circles.

Fast forward ~20 years, I started Salem Keizer Proletariat - a semi-regular newsletter taking a working class angle at reporting on local policy, politics and politicians. It was a side-project that stalled due to changing main-project demands.

Now, I use a series of automations built using Claude Code that collect municipal meeting records (agendas, minutes, etc.) - finding and accurately summarizing thousands of pages of public documents in minutes.

I designed these workflows to be as resource-efficient as possible. AI is critical to this project, but I try to minimize my use by being as efficient as possible with the tools I use.