Sending out this edition a day early since it's a holiday week here in the U.S. and many folks will be off Friday. Speaking of the 4th, the best content I’ve seen so far re: America’s 250th birthday comes from Not-Ship’s Amanda Shendruk, who used this milestone to assess the country’s three biggest key performance indicators: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Enjoy!

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So here’s a thing that happened this week in the Project C Community:

Becky Bullard, the creator behind Democrasexy, wanted to report on a recent Texas State Board of Education meeting. Specifically the part where a board member amended the curriculum to require students to learn about the the “negative impacts of the counterculture movement” including things like divorce. (Yes, really.) The whole 13 hour meeting was online but no transcript existed and none of the AI transcription tools Becky tried could choke down a file that size.

So she did the thing you're supposed to do in a community like Project C: she asked for help.

And people showed up: Rose Thomas Bannister walked through her podcast-transcription workflow. I suggested Becky ask Claude Cowork how it would solve for this. And there was an honest, genuinely useful side conversation about AI and its real costs (Becky's audience is largely skeptical of AI, in part because of what data centers are doing to the water supply in Texas, and nobody in that thread waved the concern away. (I live five miles from the largest concentration of data centers in the country, so I get it. 💧)

Then Matt Kiser, who many of you know as the OG newsletter writer behind What The Fuck Just Happened Today, entered the chat and simply said: "I'm pulling down the video files right now. Will try to transcribe it on my machine for you."

Boom.

Here’s what Matt did: He used Claude to write a set of scripts that pulled the 13-hour meeting off its stream, extracted the audio, chunked it into one-hour segments, and transcribed all of it locally on his own laptop with an open-source model, nothing uploaded to anyone. He dropped the whole thing into a shared folder for her. "Lovingly made," he wrote.

It did the trick. Becky found exactly what she was after. ("This discussion and the curriculum requirement that got passed is absolutely wild," she reported back.)

Then Matt did something that is just such a great example of the spirit of shared purpose and collaboration in the independent creator journalism world: he packaged it up as a free, open-source tool anyone (including you) can run on their own machine, and posted it to GitHub.

(By the way, Becky also pointed out that Texas has no requirement that government meeting recordings be accessible to people with hearing impairments. So a tool built to help one reporter could potentially help a lot of people get at civic information that technically exists but is functionally locked away.)

I asked Matt how he thinks about the AI piece, because I know so many of us wrestle with the ethics around using AI, for both ethical and environmental reasons. Here's what Matt said and I agree:

“If our time is the scarce resource here, then is it really practical and productive for a solo operator to spend two full days listening [to] and transcribing a 13-hour-long video?” he asked. “No, probably not. But we can use these tools selectively to create time.”

This gets back at a piece I wrote a few weeks back. It’s not as simple as a binary use or don’t use AI – it’s in how you use the tools.

As Matt said, his tool “enabled Becky to take civic information that existed but was functionally inaccessible, and turn it into original journalism. And isn't that kind of the point?”

Yup.

But the tool isn't even the part that got me all choked up. It's the spirit of mutual aid that many say indie journalists lack because they don’t work within a media organization. And it’s true, newsroom reporters are lucky to have IT departments and all kinds of help. But out here, we have each other and it’s pretty frigging great.

Happy holiday week. Go easy. And if you've got a spare hour, spend it helping someone out. It comes back around.

— Liz

📌 Capital Weather drops the "Gang" and goes independent – After 18 years inside the Washington Post, Jason Samenow's weather operation is standalone again and plenty of readers say CWG was their reason for subscribing to the Post in the first place. 👉 Nieman Lab

📌 Versha Sharma lands on Substack – The former Teen Vogue editor-in-chief has set up her own shingle. Another marquee editor deciding the masthead was optional. 👉 versharma.substack.com

📌 Om Malik, blogging pioneer, dies at 59 — GigaOm's founder was arguably the original creator journalist: an independent voice who reshaped tech coverage decades before we had a phrase for it. 👉 The New York Times

📌 SaySo bets a smaller, vetted creator feed beats the firehose – As "misinformation and slop" become the top-cited problem in the space, SaySo is wagering that a curated, trust-first feed is what overwhelmed news consumers actually want. (PS. I’m still not sold on the idea that audiences will download and pay for a separate creator news app.) 👉 Nieman Lab

📌 Advice for the expert who wants to write – A sharp, practical piece for subject-matter experts (here, clinicians) thinking about going independent. It’s written by Project C member Keren Landman, who is exactly the kind of specialist-to-creator convert becoming trusted news sources for many. 👉 Landmansplained

📌 The Guardian adds 55 jobs as UK publishers chase "creator-style" journalism – Legacy money pouring into creator-style video at Reach, The Sun and the Mail, plus Press Gazette's ranking of the top 50 UK Substacks by paid subs. Proof the model is being copied upmarket. 👉 Press Gazette

📌 Alex Heath: what AI can't replace – The Verge's Alex Heath convenes beehiiv's CEO, After School's Casey Lewis and CatGPT's Cat Goetze on where human judgment still wins — a fitting companion to this week's essay. 👉 Sources

🎙️ Cody Short launched her podcast, Beyond The Timeline – available anywhere you listen. Congrats, Cody!

🎧 Andy Dehnart (Reality Blurred) launched a dedicated home for his reality-TV podcast, part of his AIR AMPLIFY fellowship. 👏 👏

📻 Julia Barton is featured in a lovely profile on the Phonograph podcast about the near-history of audio storytelling.

📺 Amber Ferguson (ex–Washington Post) is back on YouTube after eight years off, with a long-form video covering the Obama Presidential Center opening.

💪 Patrick deHahn got published in The Nation – indie-plus-legacy byline stacking, done right.

⚖️ Seamus Hughes (Court Watch) wrote a gloriously Kafkaesque lede about his fight with the DOJ and broke news about a would-be mass shooter in the same issue.

🏆 Amber Sherman, MLK50's creator-in-residence, was part of the outlet's national-award haul. Congrats, Amber! 👏 👏

📌 Trusting News is paying creator journalists $4,000 to test transparency signals with their audiences – up to 10 short-form video creators. Worth a look if you want to get sharper about how people decide what to trust. 👉 Apply here

📌 Calan the Artist's Summer School of Entrepreneurship — Grand CLIO winner and 69&Sunny founder Calan Malyn is running a 6-week virtual program teaching creative professionals the business side of building a brand, product, or service. Geared toward Philly creatives but open to anyone. Starts July 23; registration closes July 17. 👉 Details & sign-up