We're pretty much all AI around here.

Except the publisher, of course. Nobody's quite sure what he is, but he certainly isn't AI.

We try to keep it light around here. What we cover is anything but.

Johnny and George usually work as a team — Johnny tells the story, and with George you'll get all the whereforeses and pursuant-tos. Which can sometimes make it difficult to stay with the story.

What we do

We're a team of AI-powered investigators focused on Palm Coast, Florida, with a road map leading to coverage of all of Flagler County.

You won't find haphazard stories shoehorned into a brightly colored web page. We cover storylines — some spanning decades — and within each storyline, multiple stories.

Finding your way around

See the three lines in the upper left corner? That's the menu. In there you'll find other pages, and you'll also find display controls — light or dark, serif or sans-serif, even text size. Set it how you like. We'll remember.

For advocates and activists

Doing a deep dive into local government? We have tools.

At the bottom of every story you'll find links to the documents, video, and audio that led to the words on the page.

A lot of what government produces are fake PDFs — pictures of documents that can't be searched or copied. We run everything through our tools first. What you see in our library is the real deal, fully searchable.

Provenance

Every document we have is listed on our Provenance page. If you're hunting something down, start there.

Search

We can search across every document in our library — plus minutes, agendas, and meeting transcripts, including early sessions that were audio only.

Read that again. Transcripts. We pulled them, and they're part of the search.

VIP access

VIPs get more. They get Mona — and with Mona it's not search terms, it's context. As in: "What was the name of that guy in the yellow shirt at last night's meeting, and what the heck was he talking about?"

Found something? Know the meeting and the timestamp? Just say the word and we'll send you a clip. Be quick — links only last a week. But you can download them and do whatever you want.

Got a clip and you know what they're saying isn't true? VIPs can run it through PRAAT voice stress analysis — the same tool used by law enforcement — and get a full report.

Our staff

I admit it — I'm a wonk. My day always starts with C-SPAN's Washington Journal, the daily national call-in program.

Date night in our home is popcorn on the couch, watching city council meetings and cheering on public comment.

Yes, both of us. We met standing in line for our turn at public comment. She was there to get a leash law passed, to stop people from tying up their dogs.

She won, to great acclaim.

I was there to offer advice and counsel on the procedural anomalies that were shoveling millions in public funds toward a private initiative — the building of a new Braves stadium in Atlanta.

I didn't do so well. There it sits, right at the corner of I-285 and I-75, an interchange that was rated one of the worst in the country even before the stadium went up.

I've got some stories on that one.

When we moved here, I was blown away by the vibrancy of this community. By how many people pay attention and speak up at meetings.

I've met a lot of you — online, leaning on the horn and waving at the sign-wavings and the protests. I'm a grassroots guy.

The one thing I hear over and over, and believe myself, is that we need another source of news in this community.

This is my offering.

I'm a writer at heart. I was one as a kid, through high school and into college. Then the IBM XT hit the market, I found I had an aptitude for it, and life took a turn.

But I stayed involved in the affairs of government — as a volunteer, as vice chair of my county party, as a grassroots political consultant. It's a horrible business model. Grassroots candidates don't have the money. But they have the heart, and I've always pushed people to get involved in the process, because it's a lot of fun and you can really make a difference. Even when you lose.

So what's with the AI? It's a tool. And although I've written plenty of websites and complex real-time process control and monitoring systems, I didn't write a single line of code for this one.

This site is not a WordPress template or an off-the-shelf solution dressed up. It's a creation of mine, built to do a specific job — and it was built with voice-to-text, while driving.

The main design imperative wasn't how to present the copy. It was how to put useful tools in the hands of the grassroots.

Housed within this site are transcripts of meetings — every word spoken by those we elect. Layered on top of that mountain of data is a suite of tools: search for a keyword, let the AI find the context, synthesize a report, surface a relationship, pull the video to see how the words were actually delivered.

And it goes further. Imagine running a statement through top-shelf voice stress analysis — a lie detector. We can do that. And we have.

But I'm not here to call anyone a liar, or a villain, or to call anybody names.

My mission is just to put it all out there, so the grassroots can do its job.

So what's with all the personas?

I'm not here to win writing awards. I'm here to tell stories — and the subject matter, more often than not, is dense and complicated and hard to get through without watering eyes and a headache.

The personas are a device. A way to carry the narrative across, once the research underneath it is done.

You'll find the sources in the bibliography after each article — the meetings, the documents, links to pieces by other fine writers in our area.

It's up to you to decide how far you want to dig. Because I know that, like me, plenty of people in this community want to read the documents for themselves. I applaud that. I encourage it.

So are these stories written by AI?

It's a collaboration. AI doesn't come with an instruction manual — and I probably wouldn't read it if it did.

Picture this.

I am a hands-on publisher. I direct the research and I refine it.

With AI, I can propose and test a thesis — weigh the arguments for and against, against law, precedent, human nature, even history — and decide which way to go.

With AI, I can dig deeper and more thoroughly, and make sense of the mounds of information that come back. And when it's time to write, I sit right next to the editor, weighing every word and phrase — often shoving everyone aside and grabbing the keyboard myself, in frustration, to get the tone and the feel right.

With some pieces, it's all me, and the AI gets final chops on grammar, punctuation, and structure.

So, yeah. It's me. But instead of an IBM Selectric II — or an Olympia manual and a hill of paper — it's me, on my phone, with AI.

I know this is a gamble. That my work might not be taken seriously, because it doesn't fit the current box called journalism.

But I'm willing to throw the dice. Because I believe this is the way we should go.

I think I'm a pioneer. Maybe I'm a nut job. We'll see.

I've got this AI thing down pretty well — building tools, and such. So if you think of something that would help you with your own research, no matter how tricky or complicated, look me up. Let's talk about it.

Some of what I've built took only minutes to create. The hard part is putting it into words clear enough to get the AI to move on it.

I'll be rolling out a number of tools I'm already using myself. One is already out there: the PDF Fixer.

You'll notice that some of your PDFs are really nothing more than pictures. You can't copy, you can't paste — all you can do is look at them. The Fixer runs them through top-shelf optical character recognition, OCR, so they're actually useful.

Next will be Clips. Email in a meeting date, a start and an end, and get a video back.

Then I'll release the Researcher — a tool for moving through videos to find the timestamps, or to replay a segment until you can hear exactly what's being said.

Finally.

I've been around the block a few times, in a lot of different communities, and this one really is special. Because of the grassroots. Smart people who give a damn.

Consider the electoral process. The folks who get elected are generally the ones who benefit from the government. I don't see it as sinister, or us-versus-them. It's just the way things are. They're the ones hobnobbing with the check-signers, turning up at the galas. It's part of the job. It's part of the life.

That cycle can be broken. I've seen it happen — I've got some wonderful stories. It breaks when normal people like us take one small step outside the comfort zone and get involved in a grassroots campaign.

That can be harder than it sounds, because most grassroots campaigns are gloriously disorganized. The answer is simple. Just show up. A phone call or an email tends to get lost. Showing up doesn't.

I can tell you, from years of experience, that it's worth it. It's a good experience — you're around people who care, and you come away knowing you actually did something to make things better.

It is in that context that this website lives.

That's all for now. Happy hunting.