Disclosure: The Prior is published by ABX.ca, whose technology is described in this article.
Local news has a math problem. A town like Arnprior generates a steady stream of decisions that matter — council votes, budgets, planning amendments, road closures, school notices — but not enough advertising revenue to pay a newsroom to cover them. Across Canada, the usual result is a coverage gap: decisions made in public that nobody reports.
The Prior is our answer to that math, and we think it’s worth explaining openly, because the model is the story.
The pipeline: official sources in, drafts out
Around the clock, The Prior’s publishing engine watches a roster of official sources: the Town of Arnprior’s news releases and council highlights, school board notices, provincial road alerts, weather warnings, and the public pages where schedules and planning applications quietly change.
When something new appears, the engine sends the official text to an AI model — Anthropic’s Claude — with a strict brief: report only the facts in the source, attribute everything, explain why it matters to residents in plain English, and if there’s no genuine news value, say so and write nothing. The result comes back as a complete draft: headline, article, summary, search optimization, tags, even a suggested section.
Then the most important step: a human reads it. Every draft lands in a review queue beside a link to its source. An editor verifies the facts against the original document, adds local context no database contains, and only then publishes. Nothing reaches readers on autopilot. The technology drafts; a person decides.
What that buys a one-person newsroom
The honest arithmetic: a council highlights package that would take a reporter ninety minutes to turn into a story arrives as a reviewable draft in about a minute, at an AI cost measured in cents. The daily editorial routine — review the queue, verify sources, publish, spike the misses — takes roughly thirty minutes. The machine also handles the work readers never see: search-engine metadata on every article, section sorting, image handling with proper licensing and attribution, and a backfill system that turned months of archived town records into a launch library of coverage.
That leaves the human hours for the journalism machines can’t do: sitting in the arena stands, phoning the fire chief, profiling the business that just opened on John Street, and asking council the follow-up question the agenda doesn’t answer.
The rules that make it trustworthy
Automation without editorial rules is just noise at scale, so ours are published and non-negotiable. We draft only from primary sources — official records and our own reporting — never by rewriting other outlets’ work. Every article links to its source so readers can check us. AI assistance is disclosed on every relevant piece and in our Editorial Policies, alongside a corrections policy we actually follow. Volatile information like arena schedules is linked to the town’s canonical pages rather than copied, so it can never go stale on our site. And certain things stay human forever: publish decisions, corrections, anything involving a named private individual.
Why we’re telling other community news sites
Because the coverage gap isn’t an Arnprior problem — it’s a thousand-town problem, and the economics that broke community news haven’t changed. What has changed is the cost of the first draft.
A publisher in any small town could run this model: one editor, a roster of official sources, an automation layer, and thirty disciplined minutes a day. The technology behind The Prior was built by ABX.ca in the Ottawa Valley as a transferable system — every setting lives in an admin screen, and the operations manual assumes no programming knowledge — precisely so the model could outlive and outgrow any single operator.
Want to see what this would save your newsroom?
If you publish community news — or run any organization drowning in routine content work — and want to investigate how this technology could cut your costs and free your people for higher-value work, contact us for a conversation. We’ll walk through your workflow and show you, in real numbers, where the hours and dollars go.
This isn’t a pitch from a software company that discovered journalism last quarter. Our CTO knows newspaper publishing from the inside: he was involved in the creation of one of Canada’s first online daily newspapers back in 1995, and has spent the three decades since building digital platforms. The Prior is what that experience looks like applied to today’s tools — and the same thinking can be applied to yours.
The Prior covers Arnprior, Ontario from primary sources with AI-assisted drafting and human editorial review. Read our full Editorial Policies, or get the weekly newsletter.