Matthew Broudy

Every article on croton.news is published under my name because I am the person answerable for it. I decide what this site covers, I review what it publishes, and when it gets something wrong, that is mine to correct.

What "author of record" means here

croton.news is an AI-assisted newsroom, and I want to be precise about what that does and does not change. AI systems draft copy from the public record — meeting recordings, adopted minutes, agenda packets and filed documents. They are tools. They are disclosed on every article, in a box that names which pipeline produced it and what was checked before it ran.

What they are not is authors. A byline is a statement about who is accountable, and software cannot be accountable. So the byline is mine:

• I set the editorial rules the pipelines work under and the standards they are checked against.
• I review published work, and I take articles down or correct them when they are wrong.
• I answer readers, story subjects and officials directly.
• No advertiser, official, candidate or business has any say in what appears here.

Our automated coverage passes a verification gate before it can publish — quotations must be verbatim from the recording, attributions must match the speaker who actually said them, and names and dollar figures must appear in a source document. A draft that fails is not published. That check is described in full on how we work, and its limits are stated there too: automated checking is not the same as a human reading every line, and our disclosure boxes say which one an article has had.

Why this site exists

I live in Croton-on-Hudson. [PLACEHOLDER: how long, and anything you want to say about your connection to the village — where you live, family, what you do professionally.]

Like thousands of small communities, Croton has no dedicated reporter covering its government. Board meetings run for hours with almost nobody watching. Budget decisions, zoning fights and local laws pass with minimal public scrutiny — not because anyone hides them, but because turning four hours of municipal video into something a resident will actually read is work nobody is paid to do.

[PLACEHOLDER: the moment or frustration that made you start this — a meeting you couldn't find out about, a decision you learned of too late, whatever it actually was. One honest paragraph here does more for reader trust than anything else on this page.]

I am not a trained journalist. [PLACEHOLDER: your professional background in a sentence.] That is exactly why the standards on this site are written down and enforced mechanically rather than left to judgement: the rules are public, the sources are linked, and the errors are logged where anyone can read them.

If we wrote about you

If you are named in something we published and you want to respond, correct the record, or add context, I want to hear from you and I will publish your response. That applies whether you are an elected official, an applicant before a board, or a resident who spoke at a meeting. Use the contact page and name the article — corrections do not require a reason and I do not argue about them.

Reach me

• Contact — corrections, questions, responses, right of reply
• Send a tip — confidential by default
• Corrections log — the public record of what we got wrong
• Editorial policy  ·  How we work  ·  About croton.news