clayny.news is an independent, AI-assisted civic journalism project covering the Town of Clay, New York (Onondaga County). We publish news articles, investigative features, and meeting coverage drawn entirely from official meeting minutes, agendas, and other public government documents.
Local journalism is disappearing. Clay, like thousands of communities across America, lacks dedicated reporters covering town government. Board meetings go unattended. Budget decisions, zoning fights, and policy debates — including the massive Micron semiconductor project transforming the region — happen with minimal public scrutiny.
clayny.news exists to fill that gap. We use AI to read what no single reporter could: every set of minutes from every public meeting, cross-referenced across boards, budgets, and years of records. The result is comprehensive, sourced coverage where every article links back to the official document it came from.
Source material: All content originates from public records: the official minutes and agendas published by the Town of Clay and by the Liverpool and North Syracuse school districts. Scanned documents are converted to searchable text with OCR, then indexed so every meeting can be searched and cross-referenced.
Article drafting: Articles are drafted by AI language models (Anthropic Claude) using the official record of the meeting as the source material, supplemented by cross-references to related meetings and publicly available government records. Writers work only from what the documents say — a meeting's minutes are the outer boundary of what an article may claim.
The fact gate: Before publication, every draft passes an automated verification step: quotations must appear verbatim in the source record, every dollar figure must trace to the document it came from, and personal names must match the record exactly. Drafts that fail are corrected or rejected. Published articles are also periodically re-checked against their sources by independent review passes, and errors found are fixed and noted.
Human editorial oversight: Publisher Matthew Broudy supervises the pipeline, reviews coverage, and is responsible for what appears on the site — every article is published under his name. Features and editorials get a full editor read before publication; routine minutes reports rely on the verification gate plus periodic adversarial review passes. Articles are revised or withheld if they do not meet our standards.
Transparency: Every article identifies its AI model in the metadata and links to the meeting record it was written from, so readers can verify claims against the source document. We believe radical transparency is the only ethical way to publish AI-assisted journalism. Where the record itself is incomplete — a vote not recorded, minutes not yet posted — our coverage says so rather than papering over it.
We cover the following Clay-area government bodies:
We also publish The Blotter, compiled from New York State Police public reports and Onondaga County Sheriff's Office releases (Clay incidents only, under the privacy rules in our editorial policy), a development timeline, and Clay by the Numbers, a sourced data page.
One honest limit: our coverage is only as good as the public record. Where a district posts agendas but not minutes, or the town posts a document late or misfiled, our coverage is thinner and says so.
clayny.news is published by Matthew Broudy, a hobbyist developer in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, who runs croton.news in his own village and built clayny.news and clayny.forum as a free service for the Clay community. He is the responsible editor: every article is published under his name, and he answers for it.
He does not live in Clay — and doesn't think he should decide alone what matters most here. Community feedback shapes the coverage, and he is actively looking for a Clay resident interested in serving as editor, with real editorial control. If that interests you, get in touch.
The site is not affiliated with the Town of Clay, any political party, or any commercial interest. See How we work for who does what, and the editorial policy for our standards.
clayny.news is self-funded by its publisher, who pays the hosting and AI costs out of pocket. It carries no advertising, no sponsorships, and no subscriptions; it sells nothing and collects no reader revenue. Nobody pays for coverage, and no one with a financial stake in Clay has any role in funding the site.
For questions, corrections, or tips: Contact us.
Our searchable archive contains official meeting records for 937 of the 995 meetings we track. All records are drawn from published minutes and are freely searchable via our Ask Clay tool.