Local news is shrinking fast, and what survives covers a whole city. Neighbourhood apps are full of opinions and lost cats, and council data portals are full of facts nobody reads. Street Gazette is an automatic weekly newspaper for a single street, written only from public records, with every story linked to the exact record it came from.
The data it runs on
Planning: council planning portals (applications, decisions, comment deadlines). Many UK councils run the same portal software with predictable pages; some cities publish open APIs (Toronto Open Data, NYC Open Data).
Council decisions: committee agendas and minutes, usually PDFs, parsed weekly.
Roadworks: national street works registers (for example Scotland's road works register, one.network in England) and city closure feeds.
Businesses: company registries (Companies House, Nigeria's CAC search) and licensing registers, matched to the street address.
Trees, events, weather: city tree inventories, open event listings, and a free forecast API such as Open-Meteo.
Map changes: OpenStreetMap changesets on the street (new shops, closed ones).
Limits and gaps: coverage varies hugely by city; minutes arrive late; some portals block scraping. Quiet streets have quiet weeks.
Fallback: widen the radius to 200 m or 500 m, run a smaller "briefs only" edition, and let neighbours fill the letters page.
1. The mission
Bring local news back at the smallest scale that matters: your own street. Every resident knows what is being planned, built, dug up and decided outside their door, with the record to prove it.
2. Why people can't resist it
It is about me. Your street's name in a masthead is irresistible. People print it and stick it on the fridge.
Curiosity with stakes. "What are they building at No. 31?" finally has an answer, and a deadline to comment.
A weekly ritual. A Friday paper is a habit, and the letters page makes neighbours talk.
3. How it works for real
Collect: scheduled scrapers and APIs pull records within the chosen radius; addresses are geocoded with OpenStreetMap Nominatim.
Read: a fast cheap model (Gemini Flash or DeepSeek via OpenRouter) extracts fields from PDFs and minutes and scores newsworthiness.
Write: a frontier LLM (Claude or GPT) writes headlines and stories strictly from the record fields, with every claim tied to a field.
Check: a second pass compares each sentence to its record and flags anything unsupported; flagged sentences are cut.
Lay out: a template engine fills the front page; an image model (Flux or Gemini image) draws a pen-and-ink illustration, labelled as an illustration.
Deliver: email, web and a printable PDF every Friday at 7am.
4. Cost per use
About $0.10 per street per week: record extraction and writing for 30 to 60 records, one illustration, shared across every subscriber on that street.
Free: the weekly front page for one street. Neighbour ($2 a month): extra streets, instant alerts for planning near you, the full archive. Residents' association ($15 a month): printed copies and a shared letters page moderation tool.
5. Growth loop
Each paper has a letters page and a "forward to a neighbour" button. A planning story with a comment deadline gets shared in the building's group chat. Every new street needs only one subscriber to start printing, and the masthead carries the street's name, so it spreads door to door.
6. Risks and guardrails
Accuracy: stories only say what the record says; every story links to it; a corrections box runs every week.
Privacy: applicant names on householder applications are never printed; no stories about individuals, only places and decisions.
Letters: moderated for abuse and personal attacks; first name and building number only.
Legal: respect portal terms; prefer official APIs and data licences; link back to the source.
7. MVP build order
One city with an open planning API plus a forecast API, for streets of one postcode.
LLM prompt that writes 5 stories as JSON with a record id per claim.