Case Study 01 — Legislative Intelligence
Kentucky Legislative Session Monitor
Automated monitoring of the 2026 Kentucky General Assembly — ingesting every committee meeting, surfacing enterprise story opportunities, and delivering editorial intelligence directly to reporters at scale.
The Kentucky General Assembly's 2026 session ran from January 6 through April 15 — a 10-week sprint of committee hearings, floor votes, and policy debates across dozens of standing committees. On a typical session day, the General Assembly runs six to ten committee meetings simultaneously. Our newsroom could staff two of them.
The result is predictable: stories get missed. Legislative action on education funding, healthcare access, and public safety advances with little to no coverage, because the newsroom was late or never knew it happened.
A fully automated pipeline built in MindStudio monitored the Kentucky Legislature's YouTube RSS feed continuously throughout the session. When a new committee meeting recording is posted, the system ingests it without human intervention — extracting audio, transcribing it via AssemblyAI, and analyzing the transcript with a large language model prompted to think like a beat reporter.
The output is a structured editorial report delivered by email to the Executive Producer. Story ideas are reviewed, filtered for newsworthiness and broadcast relevance, and forwarded to reporters for assignment — preserving human editorial judgment at every step.
"The AI surfaces. The journalists decide. That division of labor is intentional — and it's reflected in the numbers."
| Metric | Result | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Committee meetings ingested | 131 | Full automated coverage |
| Story ideas generated | 469 | $0.13 per idea |
| Stories pitched to reporters | 46 | After editorial review |
| Stories assigned | 38 | 83% pitch acceptance rate |
| Stories aired | 38 | 100% completion rate |
| Total system cost | $62.69 | $1.65 per aired story |