Know what your local government actually did
Retriever reads every city council, county commission, and school board meeting in its coverage area, then turns each agenda item into a short, sourced brief — cited back to the transcript line it came from.
Council splits 4–3 on extending the downtown tax increment district
$2.4M in water-line replacement awarded to a single bidder
Short-term rental registry held for a second time in six weeks
Local reporting collapsed. The meetings didn't stop.
- 3,000+
- newspapers shut down since 2005
- 40,000+
- reporting jobs lost
- 70M+
- Americans living in a news desert
- 2
- states covered, and growing
As newsrooms shrink, their ability to cover school board, city, and county meetings all but disappears. Fewer reporters on the ground means wider coverage gaps, and communities disconnected from the decisions that shape their daily lives.
Retriever is a nonprofit platform built to restore access to local information and strengthen transparency in small and rural communities. It gives newsrooms searchable, ready-to-use local content that would otherwise go uncovered.
Because it is a nonprofit, Retriever can also open a new revenue line for news organizations — selling access to the search engine helps them strengthen their footing while expanding civic transparency.
From a four-hour recording to a brief you can publish
Retriever finds the meeting on the body's own portal, pulls the recording or the minutes, transcribes it, and writes up each item separately.
Every item, written up
Each agenda item becomes a readable brief — what was decided, who voted which way, and what was said, with the outcome labelled.
Search the whole record
Full text across every brief and every transcript behind them. Find a phrase across counties and years in seconds.
Alerts that reach you
Follow a topic, an official, or a body. Get a digest when something you care about actually comes up.
Cited back to the tape
Every brief links to the transcript line and the timestamp in the official recording it came from.
Where we cover
In-depth access to local government meetings, agendas, and transcripts.
Texas
Rural towns, mid-sized cities, and county governments across the Panhandle, DFW, and East Texas.
New Mexico
Coverage spanning communities of every size, from Santa Fe County to Rio Arriba.
More states
In progress
Who builds it
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
Want Retriever covering your county, or thinking about a partnership? Tell us which bodies matter to you and we'll take it from there.