The Problem
Local news is dying. Not slowly — it's collapsing. Papers are shutting down, reporters are getting laid off, and the communities that depended on them are going dark. Westmoreland County, PA — 65 municipalities, 350,000 people — was losing coverage fast.
The information was still out there. Council meetings still happened. School boards still voted on budgets. Events still got planned. But nobody was pulling it together. Community info was scattered across government websites nobody visits, Facebook groups with 50 members, and PDFs buried three clicks deep on county portals.
People didn't need more reporters. They needed infrastructure — a system that could take public information and make it actually useful.
What We Built
We built the Greensburg Times from scratch. No journalists. No newsroom. No paywall. A complete local news platform powered by public records, government data, and community submissions.
The news feed. AI-generated articles from council meetings, school board sessions, and public records. Every piece is sourced, transparent about its origin, and free to read. Categories for legislative affairs, academic dispatches, community news, and editorials.
The event system. Automated polling of iCalendar feeds from libraries, community organizations, and government bodies every six hours. Users can subscribe to instant, daily, or weekly digest emails filtered by the event types they care about. Anyone can submit events for review.
The fish fry guide. 60+ Lenten fish fries across the county — searchable by type (parish, VFD, club, restaurant), filterable by features (lunch available, Good Friday hours, dine-in, drive-thru). Interactive map. And a March Madness-style bracket tournament where the community votes on their favorites.
Interactive county maps. Every one of Westmoreland County's 65 municipalities with boundaries. Congressional districts, state house and senate districts, voting precincts, ZIP codes, school districts — all layered on an interactive Leaflet map with GeoJSON data from Census TIGER files.
Government resource hub. County, state, and federal representatives with contacts. 2026 election guide with dates, races, and voter registration info. School district financial data from PA Annual Financial Reports.
Weather and traffic. Real-time observations from Arnold Palmer Regional Airport, NWS forecasts, and regional traffic conditions.
The Approach
This wasn't a content play. It was a systems design problem.
The question wasn't "how do we write news articles." It was "how do we build infrastructure that turns scattered public information into something a community can actually use — and that runs without depending on anyone showing up to work every morning."
We built it on Next.js with Payload CMS for content management and a PostgreSQL backend. But the architecture decisions mattered more than the stack:
Automated data ingestion. Instead of manually tracking events, we poll iCalendar feeds from local organizations on a cron schedule. New events appear automatically. Updates propagate. The system does the work.
Structured government data. We didn't just link to government websites. We pulled Census TIGER data, clipped it to county boundaries, and built interactive maps. We structured legislative contacts, school finances, and election info into queryable formats.
Subscriber intelligence. The email system isn't a blast list. Subscribers choose their frequency and filter by event types. The system sends what's relevant, not everything. Instant notifications for new events. Daily digests. Weekly roundups. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe.
Community contribution. Event submissions, correction requests, and editorial submissions give the community ownership. The CMS review workflow keeps quality up without gatekeeping.
The Results
The site launched and the community showed up immediately.
Why This Matters
Local news isn't dying because people don't care. It's dying because the business model collapsed. The information is still there — it's just nobody's job to organize it anymore.
We didn't replace journalists. We built the infrastructure layer underneath — the part that takes public records, government data, community calendars, and geographic information and turns it into something a county of 350,000 people can actually navigate.
That's what GRIME does. We look at systems that are broken, figure out what's actually needed, and build something maintainable. The Greensburg Times doesn't need a newsroom. It needs a system that works. That's what we built.