Rebuilding Local Journalism Through Technology
Retriever is a search engine that empowers local newsrooms to rebuild community coverage—providing essential content at a time when local reporting has declined.
Why We Created Retriever
Over the past two decades, local journalism has faced a devastating decline.
3,000+
Newspapers Shut Down
40,000+
Reporters Lost
70M+
Americans in News Deserts
2
States Covered (and Growing)
As newsrooms shrink, their ability to cover essential local issues like school board, city, and county government meetings has all but disappeared. With fewer reporters on the ground, coverage gaps have grown wider, leaving communities uninformed and disconnected from the decisions that affect their daily lives.
This downward spiral inspired us to create Retriever—a nonprofit platform built to restore access to local information and strengthen transparency in small and rural communities. We designed Retriever to help newsrooms rebuild capacity, providing them with searchable, ready-to-use local content that would otherwise go uncovered.
As a nonprofit, Retriever opens the door to innovation and sustainability in local media. By offering a new revenue stream through the ability to sell access to our AI-powered search engine, we help news organizations strengthen their financial footing while expanding transparency and civic engagement.
What Is Retriever?
Our platform enables journalists to efficiently cover school board, city, and county government meetings despite shrinking staff, ensuring that critical stories in small towns and rural areas don't go untold.
AI Meeting Summaries
Every agenda item distilled into clear, readable stories with key people, votes, and full context.
Searchable Transcripts
Full-text search across transcripts, stories, and people. Find anything in seconds.
Smart Alerts
Subscribe to topics, people, or institutions. Get email digests when something you care about happens.
States We Cover
Providing in-depth access to local government meetings, agendas, and transcripts.
Texas
Rural towns, mid-sized cities, and county governments across the Lone Star State.
New Mexico
Coverage spanning communities of all sizes throughout the Land of Enchantment.
More States
Coming Soon
We're actively expanding across other states, with plans to bring Retriever's search and reporting tools to newsrooms across the country.
Retriever's AI-Powered Search Engine
Designed to make finding local information fast, intuitive, and precise. Filter results by keywords, states, counties, or cities to locate the exact meeting, discussion, or topic you're looking for.
Journalists
Track policy changes across jurisdictions
Researchers
Study local government trends at scale
Citizens
Stay informed about what affects your life
Meet the Founders
The team behind Retriever Technology.
Michael Braga
CEO
A Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist who worked for USA Today and the Arizona Republic. He is now a professor of practice at Texas Tech University and Editor of West Texas Watchdogs.
Raj Jadhav
CTO
A graduate of Texas Tech with a B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in Math. Raj is responsible for building Retriever’s universal scraper and its AI-powered search engine.
Madilyn Coyne
Director of Marketing & Sales
A former White House intern, Madilyn is a Texas Tech political journalism student and digital creator. She was a host of Texas Tech’s MCTV political segment, Inside the Issues, and is Managing Editor of West Texas Watchdogs.
Get in Touch
Interested in bringing Retriever to your newsroom? Have questions? We'd love to hear from you.