Innovation in Local News: How Locunity is Informing Communities in the Bay Area

Host Jared Asch interviews Jonathan Bash, CEO of Locunity, about how local information is changing as Bay Area newspapers lost most of their journalists after private equity consolidation, creating gaps in coverage of councils, boards, and special districts. Bash explains how Locunity uses AI to download and transcribe public meeting videos, ingest agendas, and convert them into structured data that powers free city newsletters plus alerts, roundups, briefings, and reports with quotes tied to source video for “ground truth.” The platform helps residents, advocacy groups, government relations teams, and journalists quickly identify relevant issues across many jurisdictions and beats. They discuss shifting media habits, declining social media usefulness amid bots and AI content, and the rise of AI-driven information retrieval. Bash describes Locunity’s growth to about 120 Bay Area jurisdictions plus Louisville, its funding via mission-aligned angel investors, and plans to scale nationally.