About My Local Press
We're building something new.
The Future of Local News
Papers are closing. Newsrooms are shrinking. Communities are losing the reporters, editors, and storytellers who kept them informed.
We're building a platform that's nimble enough to adapt as the future of local news takes shape. AI is changing how tools get built — and we're using it to move fast, keep costs low, and put capable publishing tools in the hands of people who actually cover their communities. But AI doesn't replace the reporter at the city council meeting. It doesn't replace the editor who knows which story matters. It doesn't replace the person who shows up with a camera when the creek floods.
People are the point. AI helps us build the tools — and as the platform evolves, it'll help journalists work more efficiently and tell stories in more ways: beyond text and photos into audio, video, and other formats. But the journalist is still the one who decides what's worth covering and what to publish — the final curator, accountable for their work. The buck stops with them.
Who We Are
We're two people: an investor and a programmer, working together on an idea we believe in. That's it. No board of directors. No investors demanding growth at all costs.
This lets us keep platform costs low, so more revenue goes directly to the people creating it. That's our goal.
We're not venture-backed, and we don't have YouTube's infrastructure or the deep pockets some larger platforms lean on. That's deliberate. We're trying to make this profitable on the same economics a small-town newsroom faces — because those are the realities we're building for, and a platform that can't sustain itself is no help to the towns that need it.
We're glad for large donors who want to help the mission along. We're just not interested in being beholden to them — no board seats or partnership strings, at least for now. If that ever changes, it'll be a decision, not a drift.
What Inspired Us
Two stories shaped this platform. Reviving Rural News made the case that community journalism can pay for itself — and showed how. And Judy Woodruff's PBS NewsHour visit to Canadian, Texas, after the town's paper stopped printing, showed what's lost when it doesn't. A rancher there, asked whether he always agreed with the paper's editor: "No. No. But she always made me think."
Both are on our Resources page , along with tools and services we recommend.
Built on Respect
On My Local Press, your visibility comes from whether your community respects your work. How Respect works.
We want to make it dead simple to create local content — and dead simple to consume it, wherever people are. On your phone. On your TV. In your car. Whatever comes next.
Our approach is built on community vouching. Real people verifying other real people. It's an experiment — we haven't seen anyone try this quite this way before. We're figuring it out as we go, with input from our community.
How Vouching Works
Real people verifying other real people. You have to be vouched for to create content, and once you're in, you can vouch for others — a chain of trust that grows on its own.
We're Still Building
This is a beta. Things will break. Features will change. We're moving fast and want your ideas and feedback along the way.
Your feedback shapes what we build. Your participation in the vouching system helps us discover how to make this approach work even better.
When you find a bug, tell us. When you have an idea, share it. When something frustrates you, let us know. Use our feedback form anytime.
For Contributors and Organizations
No audience threshold, no minimum payout, no startup cost. Our goal is to make it possible for local reporters, citizen journalists, and community storytellers to actually make a living doing this work.
My Local Press — Building the future of local news together.
We ship updates all the time, so a page here and there can fall behind. See something off? Have a question? Let us know and we'll address it.