Find signals
Scan official sources, public local media, documents, feeds, and public community spaces. Search is a fallback, not the only discovery strategy.
What it is for
Local news lost the labor. The work still has to happen.
Small towns still have council packets, zoning changes, police controversies, land deals, public notices, school-board decisions, and community rumors that deserve attention. The Civic Desk is built to reduce the routine digging so a human editor can spend time on judgment, verification, interviews, and publication.
Keep the trail
Leads stay tied to source records, evidence, entities, verification tasks, and editorial status. The system should explain why something matters.
Warn without vetoing
Guardrails and press-freedom review can flag sourcing, defamation, privacy, and quality risks. They do not replace the editor.
The newsroom loop
From source intake to a published issue.
The app is not a magic article machine. It is a local newsroom desk that helps a person move through the whole cycle.
Collect sources
Add official city pages, public notices, local media, public social/community sources, spreadsheets, documents, and source lists. PDF import is disabled in the public beta until hardened parsing is available.
Scan and triage
Fetch sources, detect changes and civic observations, extract entities, dedupe overlapping leads, and rank items for human review.
Draft and edit
Use local AI when available, then rewrite. Workbench supports review, approval, hold, send-back, advisory guardrails, and source checks.
Publish and share
Compile a static issue, export a ZIP, publish with here.now anonymous preview by default, and generate share copy. Durable archives use your own credentialed connector and should be verified for the release.
Recommended default
here.now
Publish instantly from the app. Anonymous previews are useful for testing; account/API-key publishing is the path for permanent here.now sites.
Durable archive
GitHub Pages
Use a public repository-backed archive when a publisher wants long-term public history and versioned static files.
Technical hosting
Netlify / manual Cloudflare
Use Netlify through its token connector, or export the folder/ZIP and deploy manually to Cloudflare Pages.
Distribution
Substack and social copy
The paper should have a canonical website first. Newsletter, Substack, Facebook, Reddit, Nextdoor, and short blurbs help residents find it.
Publishing model
Publish instantly with here.now. Keep an archive when you need one.
The Civic Desk compiles a flat HTML paper and a ZIP package. That means the output can be reviewed, archived, moved, hosted, or republished without locking the publisher into one platform.
Beta honesty:
Use an official v0.3.3 installer and verify its published checksum. The macOS build is Apple Silicon only, unsigned, and unnotarized; Linux is deferred to v0.3.4. Output quality still depends on editor review, source quality, and local AI behavior.
Human judgment stays central
The system should never quietly decide what the public is allowed to see.
The Civic Desk can warn about weak sourcing, evergreen filler, reporter-note scaffolding, legal risk, and missing verification. It can rank and explain. It should not hide a lead from the editor or silently make the news judgment, but visible static-package integrity blockers stop approval/export until broken public output is repaired.
- Advisory guardrails, not machine censorship.
- Evidence and source links remain visible to the editor.
- Drafts are starting points, not finished journalism.
Get the public beta
v0.3.3 for Windows and Apple Silicon Mac.
Status: both v0.3.3 public-beta artifacts are published from commit e94a2f94885c1e6013129c3d854662cc3c8e5b27. Windows is signed and timestamped. macOS is intentionally unsigned and unnotarized.
Download only from the official v0.3.3 release and verify the exact file against SHA256SUMS before opening it.
Initial installation requires an internet connection when Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime is not already installed. Keep the computer online for first-run local AI setup as well; it downloads the app-managed Ollama runtime and selected model. This public-beta installer is not an offline installer.
Windows
Windows x64. Use the signed The.Civic.Desk_0.3.3_x64-setup.exe installer with an internet connection. SHA256: 3d08ec394d87329043acd57f8f714cdcfdf10b3670631861ba16bc397c6befd2.
Apple Silicon macOS
macOS 11+, Apple Silicon only. The.Civic.Desk_0.3.3_aarch64.dmg is unsigned and unnotarized. SHA256: 95c82afa6549a5648e919306b3fbc6b7f7336ee331ca7f3c7091d87d3d11f01b.