GoKawiilPhiladelphia Inquirer builds AI tool Scrape to surface hyperlocal newsletter leads
The Philadelphia Inquirer, working with The Lenfest Institute's AI Fellowship program, developed an internal tool called Scrape to help editors find newsworthy items for its hyperlocal newsletters. The tool was trained by comparing its daily automated tip sheets against ones an editor had been compiling manually from sources like municipal meetings, school calendars, and Facebook pages, a task that previously consumed about 12 hours of an editor's week.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The project suggests local newsrooms with limited staff could use AI to triage large volumes of scattered community information, potentially freeing editors to focus on writing and judgment rather than manual searching. Grounding the tool in an editor's existing curated sources and comparing outputs directly, as Kevin Hoffman described, indicates a cautious approach aimed at verifying AI reliability before trusting it with editorial decisions.
- The Inquirer built Scrape to automate sourcing for hyperlocal newsletters across Philadelphia communities.
- The tool was developed via the Lenfest AI Collaborative and Fellowship Program, with Kevin Hoffman as embedded AI Fellow.
- Scrape was tested by comparing its daily tip sheets against an editor's manually produced ones to check accuracy.
Source: lenfestinstitute.org, 2026-10-02
Published there as: “The Philadelphia Inquirer built Scrape, an AI tool to surface hyperlocal news”
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