Local News Pipeline

The Knowsley Lead (no articles)
The Knowsley Lead (6 published articles)
Cowork's 5-phase pipeline (demo view)

Inspiration

The UK's Local News Industry has collapsed as its syndicates have consolidated around clickbait titles. This means locals turn to social media, where sources have no skin in the game and thrive on inflammatory content.

The reliable features of Cowork's interface mean it can be used to replace a team of journalists with one (or none) moving several times the speed. The niche for well-researched content can suddenly be occupied again.

What it does

Five phases (all in cowork, triggered as skills): 1) Find areas of the UK with no local news source 2) Build a website with comments, telemetry, profile-building, and events page built-in 3) Find stories using 60+ data sources, including council minutes, local social media, and UK Open Data 4) Write and de-slopify choice articles for editors to prune and publish 5) Publish guard (hook) to avoid sloppy articles going live

How we built it

I gave Claude Code a single big prompt at the start of day 1. It built it without issues, and even had time for a couple of side-projects!

Challenges we ran into

The /demo skill was a difficult thing for Cowork to conceptualise. This morning I've had to go back and forth constantly to give it the self-awareness of its own interface it needs.

In particular, Cowork has quite a limited sandbox, so it can't run node processes and scripts unless they're carefully packaged.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1) Identifying a real issue. 2) The /demo skill! I haven't seen anyone do it before, so I hope it's fun to watch. 3) Being able to do side-projects at the same time. What a time to be alive!