Welcome to Bridgewater Raynham News
What is this?
This is a free experiment in Artificial Intelligence (AI) assisted news coverage to help keep Bridgewater and Raynham residents informed about their community through coverage of local government meetings. Our goal is to inform, not editorialize, and to provide information to citizens who want to know what’s happening, but don’t have the time or desire to watch or attend meetings that can span three hours on a weeknight.
We intend to cover the Raynham Board of Selectmen, Bridgewater Town Council and Bridgewater-Raynham Regional School District, as well as the active boards and committees in each town. We will also cover the Plymouth County Commissioners. We would like to cover the Bristol Plymouth School Committee and Bristol County Commissioners, and are working on a way to do so.
Bridgewater Raynham News uses generative AI to process recordings of local cable access meetings into a news story. Depending on the number of topics and the depth of the discussion, articles may be generated for multiple topics discussed at a single meeting.
From there, we (Matthew Lyford and Lauren DeFillipo… more about us later) edit the article(s). We check to confirm the speakers are accurately identified, names are spelled correctly, and that the articles will help inform our readers of the business of their local governments. We then post the articles on Bridgewater Raynham News, which is hosted by Substack.
If you see anything that doesn’t look right, please let us know (bridgewaterraynhamnews@gmail.com). We thoroughly review each article before posting, but can of course miss things. If you think we’ve missed something important, or mischaracterized something, please also let us know.
The Inspiration
The decline of local news has been evident for decades. Bridgewater and Raynahm, previously served by entities such as the Brockton Enterprise, the Bridgewater Independent, and the Taunton Gazette have seen less and less coverage of local government.
If not for this decline, we would not have taken on this AI assisted venture. We would never crowd out the work of local journalists, who work extremely hard for modest pay and little recognition. However, this space has been vacated in our community.
We found inspiration in the work of the Winchester News and Gotta Know Medford, but after stumbling upon South Shore News, we found a model that we felt we could replicate given our limited time and financial resources. Justin Evans, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of South Shore News was kind enough to offer his time and expertise to us, and for that we are forever grateful. We encourage anyone reading this to support independent journalism where you can.
Who are We?
We are Matthew Lyford and Lauren DeFillipo.
Matt was born in Bridgewater, grew up in Raynham, and has lived with his family in Bridgewater since 2017. He is a Bridgewater-Raynham High School and Bridgewater State University (then College) graduate. He has two young children who either are or will be attending Bridgewater-Raynham schools.
Lauren was born and raised in New Jersey and has lived in Massachusetts since 2007 and moved with her family to Bridgewater in 2017. She is a former award-winning community journalist for publications in New Jersey and Massachusetts and worked in both state and local government for over a decade. Lauren is a proud graduate of the University of Massachusetts - Amherst and has two children.
We offer this service for free, and assure you that we only lose time and money in this effort. We want to serve what we see as a need in our community – the lack of local news. Our goal is to provide fair, quality coverage of local government.
The decline of local news for the last two decades made it clear that no one will be coming to do this for us, so we’ve decided to do it ourselves. We thank you for your time, attention and support. Please subscribe and share with your friends and family.