Break local government stories earlier - with a real-time municipal meeting feed.
GovData Newsroom Feed turns scattered agenda PDFs and portal pages into structured, time-stamped events
across thousands of jurisdictions - agenda items, attachments, motions, and votes.
The advantage is simple: municipal decisions publish first. Most coverage comes later.
Built for newsroom workflows. Alerts, watchlists, and story leads - with deep links and provenance.
What news organizations can do with the feed
Think of this as a municipal early-warning system that turns agendas into story leads.
Get story leads as soon as items publish
Identify high-impact agenda items and attachments before competitors see them.
- Auto-flag new agenda items by topic
- Detect newly posted staff reports and exhibits
- Surface late agenda additions and changes
- Deep links back to source portals
Cover more jurisdictions with fewer reporters
Turn “too many meetings” into a manageable pipeline.
- Watchlists for cities, departments, boards, and committees
- Agenda digests by beat (housing, schools, policing, climate)
- Calendar-style publishing schedules for meeting cadence
- Inbox and Slack-style alert delivery options
Track patterns across time and jurisdictions
Find repeated vendors, recurring proposals, and quiet policy shifts.
- Cross-city searches over agenda items and files
- Vendor and contract approval tracking
- Public safety tech adoption monitoring
- Follow the lifecycle from proposal to vote outcome
Turn meetings into structured datasets and charts
Build dashboards and recurring series with reliable joins and stable identifiers.
- Vote tallies and roll-calls where available
- Topic counts over time
- Change detection and “what just happened” summaries
- Provenance for every record
Track the upstream of housing, zoning, and regulation
Municipal decisions often precede permits, enforcement, and market impact.
- Zoning and land-use changes
- Short-term rental rules and enforcement
- Infrastructure commitments and capital projects
- Ordinance changes and fee schedules
Generate briefs, not busywork
Use the structured feed to create internal briefs and reporter prep packets.
- Meeting preview briefs with links to attachments
- Post-meeting outcome summaries
- Editor dashboards with “top stories this week”
- Integration-ready exports (CSV/JSON/Parquet)
Structured provenance, not scraped blur
Most portals expose content as pages and PDFs. We preserve the relationships newsrooms actually need.
What we capture
- Meetings: bodies, dates, locations, minutes, attendance (where available)
- Agendas: items, ordering, timestamps, status changes
- Files / Matters: underlying legislative objects and lifecycle
- Motions + Votes: outcomes, roll-calls, vote counts (where available)
- Attachments: staff reports, exhibits, PDFs, and metadata
- Jurisdictions: normalized identifiers for reliable joins
Key idea: preserve meeting → agenda → item → motion → vote → attachment so every story lead can be traced back.
Why news teams like this structure
- Fast filtering: find what matters without reading the whole packet
- Stable IDs: track the same item across updates and reposts
- Change logs: know what changed since yesterday
- Provenance: reliable citations for editors and readers
- Scale: cover 10 cities like you used to cover 1
We can deliver a pilot slice tailored to your beat coverage - housing, schools, policing, climate, or all of the above.
Alerts + feeds that fit newsroom tooling
Start simple with a daily digest - then move to intraday alerts when the workflow proves value.
Morning and afternoon drops
New items, new attachments, and changed records across your watchlist.
- By jurisdiction, board, and topic
- Change summary with deep links
- CSV/JSON export options
- Optional “top leads” ranking
As soon as it publishes
For competitive beats and investigative desks that want speed.
- Webhook-style feed or API
- Watchlists and keyword/topic triggers
- Attachment detection and alerts
- Late-arriving corrections handled
Search and backfill for series reporting
Build local-government search and analytics inside your newsroom stack.
- Bulk historical backfills (Parquet/CSV/JSON)
- Entity endpoints for retrieval workflows
- As-of queries for “what was known when”
- Stable joins across jurisdictions
We can start with a small pilot - a defined region, a handful of beats, and a short time window - then expand once it proves value.
Request a 2-week newsroom pilot
Tell us your coverage area, beats, and how you want alerts delivered. We’ll propose a small but meaningful slice.
What you’ll receive
Designed to fit editorial and data workflows without a big integration lift.
- Coverage slice definition (jurisdictions, boards, topics)
- Sample alerts and a daily digest format
- Schema overview and sample records
- Delivery option that matches your tooling (CSV/JSON/API)
- Short working call with your editors or data team
If you already use Slack, Teams, or email distribution lists, we can align the pilot delivery to those patterns.
Principal: Darius Tajanko, Original Legistar Architect
Email: info@govdataconsulting.com
Phone: (312) 767-4004
For fastest turnaround, email: (1) your region, (2) your beats, (3) daily digest vs intraday alerts, and (4) your preferred format.