Open Council Network for Journalists

OCN can help you improve efficiency and cost reduction, coverage confidence, and reporting quality by addressing three major challenges: focus prioritisation, geographic limitations and research efficiency.

We provide journalists with comprehensive tools to cover local government more effectively, discover meaningful stories, and produce higher quality journalism in less time.

Focus Prioritisation

Local government produces vast amounts of information across multiple councils, making it difficult for journalists to identify the most newsworthy stories and ensure they don't miss important developments.

This challenge prevents journalists from covering the full scope of local government activity and often leads to missed opportunities for impactful stories.

It creates a barrier between journalists and the wealth of local political stories that directly affect communities.

It forces journalists to spend excessive time on discovery rather than investigation and writing.

How?

1. Receive custom weekly emails covering everything discussed in meetings across the week, tailored specifically for journalists.
2. Get rapid daily update emails highlighting the most newsworthy developments as they happen.
3. Access a single platform with videos, transcripts, report packs, summaries and related images for comprehensive initial research.
4. Quickly review past meetings to ensure nothing significant was missed.

Geographic Limitations

Journalists are often limited to covering a single council or small geographic area, missing important stories and trends that span multiple local authorities.

This limitation prevents journalists from discovering broader patterns, comparing approaches across councils, and identifying regional or national stories with local angles.

It restricts the scope of local political coverage and prevents journalists from providing comprehensive analysis of local government trends.

How?

1. Access data aggregated across multiple councils to view statistics and trends that span geographic boundaries.
2. Discover meaningful stories that emerge from comparing approaches across different local authorities.
3. Identify regional patterns and national stories with strong local angles that would otherwise be missed.
4. Expand your coverage area without proportionally increasing your workload.

Research Efficiency

Traditional local government research is time-consuming and inefficient, requiring journalists to manually sift through meeting records, track down documents, and piece together context from multiple sources.

This inefficiency reduces the quality of journalism that can be produced within available time constraints and prevents journalists from focusing on investigation and writing.

It creates barriers to producing meaningful local political stories that truly affect local people.

How?

1. Access historical meetings and comprehensive archives to build context and track developments over time.
2. Receive pre-summarized content that highlights key decisions, debates, and outcomes from meetings.
3. Get rapid access to all supporting documents, reports, and related materials in one place.
4. Use our search and filtering tools to quickly find relevant information across multiple councils and time periods.
5. Ask questions directly about any meeting and get instant answers with clickable links to source material—no more watching hours of video or reading lengthy documents to find what you need.

Faster Story Research with Verifiable Sources

When researching a story, you need specific information fast—not hours spent watching meeting videos or reading through lengthy documents. Traditional research methods force you to manually sift through hours of content to find the exact quote, decision, or context you need.

This inefficiency prevents you from producing more stories and reduces the time available for investigation and writing.

How?

1. Ask natural language questions about any meeting—like "What were the main concerns about the development?" or "How did councillors vote on the budget?"—and get immediate answers.
2. Receive responses with direct quotes from transcripts, documents, or summaries, giving you the exact information you need for your story.
3. Click any quote to jump directly to the source—whether it's a specific moment in a meeting video, a document, or a section of the summary—for instant fact-checking and verification.
4. Build stronger stories with verifiable, source-backed information while dramatically reducing research time.