Local government meetings are a crucial source of local news, but they are long, unpredictable, and time-intensive to analyse. News start-up Gazette’s reporters cover multiple local government areas (LGAs), so important stories were getting lost due to the time required to attend, summarise and report on these meetings. Gazette needed a way to efficiently surface newsworthy stories without being present at the meeting itself.

Gazette developed "CivIQ," an AI tool that automates analysis of council meetings. The tool detects when a new meeting video has been uploaded to a council website, uses Google Cloud Speech-to-Text to transcribe what is said, sends that transcript to Gemini to find angles and new information, and delivers the results to Slack with an alert for the journalist responsible for that area.

Beta testing with real users began in February, with initial feedback indicating strong approval from journalists. A council meeting story that used to take three hours manually now takes one hour with the AI. The average number of council stories produced per publication in a month increased more than 5x, from 1.2 to 6.5 stories.