I’m excited to share a short chat with Max Resnik, Director of Growth for City Bureau and Director of Network Services for the Documenters Network Project.
I met Max at a talk on the history of NYC newspapers, was introduced to the Documenters project, and couldn’t stop asking him questions about it. In this frightening age of wealth-controlled media, AI-generated slop (or hallucinations), newsroom layoffs, and increasing misinformation, I loved learning about this new network of citizen journalists having significant impact.
How can you help change the world? Take good notes.
16 minutes. Press the big play button above to listen here / in the Substack app, or watch the video on YouTube. Highlights below!
5 questions and some favorite quotes
Listen to the episode or read the transcript for full context and more great insights
How did Documenters get started?
“The idea was that Documenters could regularly go to these meetings where there were no records of what was going on. In a lot of cases you might get an agenda, you might get a set of meeting minutes, but by and large it’s really difficult to know what happens in a lot of local public meetings… We built out a custom piece of web technology called documenters.org, where we scrape public meeting data and allow local teams to be able to recruit, train, and then send people on assignment to local government meetings in their areas.”
What impacts has it had?
“We look at impact across four main areas… The impacts on the cities themselves. How are local governments becoming more transparent? How many more meetings are made available?… The ways that newsrooms begin to collaborate more with community members… Most importantly, the impact on Documenters. Are people feeling more comfortable going to these meetings? How are their writing skills improving? What do they go on to do after being involved?” [Learn more about City Bureau’s metrics here]
How can people get involved?
“ If you visit Documenters.org you can see via dropdown menu all the cities where we're currently active. Most of our teams will host either a combination of in-person events for local residents, and virtual training so that people who can't make it to a library or the newsroom can still have an opportunity to get trained. …We are raising funding in every single city so that people can be paid to do this work.”
How is AI affecting your work?
“ We are bullish, in that Documenters are able to do things that computers cannot. If you are a resident, you know what it means when this particular grocery store is shutting down or if a school is not able to continue offering free lunch. These are things that a computer might be able to pick out and might be able to offer some perspective on, but are not in any way matchable by the local experience of somebody who lives in that community. …But, one of the ways that AI has been most helpful for those teams is in fact checking... to track if there were things that were on the agenda, for example, that the Documenter just was not able to get down fast enough.”
What vision do you have for the news?
“ We’re thinking a lot about how for non-native English speakers, for folks who need this critical information about housing, about food about schools, how to be able to make that information available across languages… and we’re really excited to see how statewide networks are forming and teams across regions that maybe historically were never served by local news at all, are able to have a better, more reliable and regular set of eyes and ears on these local government meetings.”
More about Documenters and its impact
Metrics to Match Our Mission: Measuring City Bureau’s Impact
Testify — a collaborative project with The Marshall Project and the community, investigating the county judicial system
‘Tangled titles’ could cost these Detroiters thousands — helping people get tax foreclosures back
Detroit Documenters talk public meetings, civic engagement every Friday — a civic talk show hosted by a Documenter
A San Diego city board hasn’t met for nearly a year. It took a Documenter to find out why.
Other resources mentioned
News Product Alliance (NPA) Slack — collaborative, solution-oriented community of news professionals
The Bowery Boys — NYC history podcast and walking tours, including “The NY Newspaper History Tour”
The Montauk Club — a charming old hangout in north Park Slope
Full transcript with links
Share this post