This is an evolving document that reflects our current thinking about the value we can offer the Croton-on-Hudson community. As we learn and grow, these principles will be refined.
Welcome to Croton.news. We are an experimental, AI-assisted civic technology platform dedicated to making Croton-on-Hudson's municipal meetings searchable and accessible. Because we operate differently than a traditional local blog, we want to be completely transparent about our methodology and the strict boundaries we maintain regarding community data.
We build our pipeline primarily around primary sources. By relying on the original public record rather than secondary reports, we ensure our summaries reflect the raw events of municipal meetings. We believe the community is best served when they have direct access to the unfiltered source material.
As an actively developing automated pipeline, technical errors—such as misspellings or name misattributions—will occasionally occur. We log every system correction centrally and permanently. We believe owning our technical limitations upfront is far more professional than relying on our readers to explain basic legal or municipal procedures to us post-publication, or issuing vague corrections.
Our platform is a neutral tool designed to index public records, not weaponize them. We present municipal data as it occurs, rather than artificially framing routine administrative planning as “secret” conversations, or escalating minor local code disputes into polarizing national spectacles to drive engagement.
We strictly separate objective civic data from activist commentary. We are committed to maintaining the highest level of professional trust with our community and local institutions—a trust that is fundamentally broken when opinion, personal grievances, and uncorroborated assertions are masqueraded as investigative journalism.
We believe that if a platform states a claim as a definitive fact, it bears the absolute journalistic responsibility to provide the data to substantiate it. We welcome rigorous community feedback. We will never dodge verification requests, nor will we suspend users or hide comments simply because a reader asked for empirical proof to back up our reporting. A community data site should invite questioning, not ban the residents who ask the questions.