Hearst's newsrooms used AI to follow 10,000 public meetings

Local news has a meetings problem. School boards, city councils and county commissions all meet, often at the same time, often for hours, and there are not enough reporters to sit in every room.

Hearst Newspapers built a tool for that. In a September 3, 2026 post for INMA, the company's director of newsroom projects explains that Assembly turns "lengthy meeting recordings into transcripts, summaries, and alerts." It "now tracks 460 public agencies across the country" and "has processed more than 10,000 meetings."

The bottleneck then moved to adding new agencies, which needed engineering work. An agentic system now handles those requests: "Requests that once took days or even weeks to fulfil can now be completed in minutes." The agent writes code and "submits it for human review before anything goes live to readers."

Reporters notice. An education reporter at the Times Union in Albany, New York says her school boards often meet at the same time, and Assembly lets her catch up on all of them. A senior investigations editor at the Houston Chronicle put it more bluntly: "This tool could have literally saved years of my life." Hearst has also opened a reader-facing version, Meeting Monitor, piloted in Houston and now in beta in Connecticut covering eight school districts.

How to read this: this is Hearst describing its own tool, and it does not put a number on hours saved beyond "countless hours." The measured gains are in coverage, 460 agencies and 10,000+ meetings, and in turnaround for new agencies. Hearst says the aim "is not to replace journalists, but to support them."

The count of agencies, Hearst says, is "a number that grows each week."