CalMatters partnered with California Polytechnic State University to build the Digital Democracy project — technology that reveals how decisions are made in California. It’s a custom-built AI tool that tracks every word spoken in public hearings, every dollar donated to politicians, every bill introduced, every vote cast, and more.
While the website is a treasure trove of useful information, it can be overwhelming if you don’t know where to go to get the information you need.
That’s why the team launched a new newsletter as an extension of Digital Democracy called My Legislator. We spoke with the Chief Impact Officer at CalMatters, Sisi Wei, and CalMatters’ CEO, Neil Chase, about the purpose behind the newsletter, how they built it, and the results they’ve seen so far.
What is My Legislator?
My Legislator is a newsletter that provides weekly reports on California’s state legislators. Subscribers receive updates about how their lawmakers vote, who is donating to their campaigns, what bills they’ve authored, and more.
Why launch My Legislator?
“We hear this all the time from our readers that they want to be more involved, but it’s so difficult. And it doesn’t matter that our Digital Democracy database is published online for anybody to look at. You can look up all this information about your representatives. It requires that you first know who they are, and then it requires that you go to their page and then think about, ‘oh, how do I interpret this information?’ ” explained Wei.
All the information in the My Legislator newsletter is available on the Digital Democracy site. But, instead of sifting through the website to find information, subscribers can simply sign up for My Legislator to get the information pertinent to them automatically delivered to their inbox.
When you sign up for the newsletter, you have the option to select your Assembly and Senate members. But you can also simply enter your home address to track your legislators.
How did CalMatters build My Legislator?
The My Legislator newsletter runs on CalMatters’ Digital Democracy database, which ingests roughly 100 different data feeds.
There were a lot of interesting content design and product questions they had to figure out when designing My Legislator. The team is creating 120 different newsletters and then putting two of them together for each subscriber based on their selected legislators. That takes a mix of hard-coding and templating in their newsletter system.
One of the trickier editorial and technical challenges was handling quotes. Wei and the team wanted to include quotes from legislators in My Legislator to capture the human side of what they are saying, rather than just the numbers behind their actions.
Because the database captures every word spoken in a public hearing, the team needed a way to surface the most interesting things a legislator said each week without having a human read everything.
Their solution: AI suggests the three most compelling quotes from each legislator, and then a human editor makes the final call on which one to use.
“We know that there have been newsrooms that have accidentally gotten to this problem where you use AI to manage quotes for you, and then it just spits out a version of the quote that’s not real, and it changes something, and it doesn’t understand this. So our engineering team did something I think is very clever, which is that all quotes are associated with a number,” explained Wei.
Editors choose which numbered quote to use, and the quote is then included verbatim in the newsletter.
The broader AI layer that powers Digital Democracy uses a concept the team calls “phenomena” (or “phenoms”): patterns in the data that signal something newsworthy. These might include a legislator speaking far longer than usual, a bill that underwent a major last-minute language change (a Sacramento practice known as “gut and amend”), or a voting pattern that breaks from a legislator’s history. Journalists at CalMatters and in other newsrooms throughout California review the tips and decide which ones to pursue as possible stories.
“Part of the reason we’re manually curating it and will be for a long time, maybe forever, is that those things obviously don’t take news value into account as much as we’d like,” said Chase.
The newsletter currently runs on a templated system that requires the team to hard-code it and push it into their email platform each week. Rebuilding that infrastructure to be more machine-readable and API-friendly is one of the team’s priorities over the next six months. They’re also working on plans to extend Digital Democracy to other states. Honolulu Civil Beat’s Digital Democracy site is the latest example of this for the state of Hawaii.
What were the initial results?
My Legislator has helped CalMatters expand its audience and drive greater engagement among its current members. It grew from 2,000 to 3,000 subscribers in beta to 9,000 in two months. Approximately 50% of subscribers do not subscribe to any other CalMatters newsletters. They’ve even seen donations increase because of this newsletter.
What was the feedback post-launch?
CalMatters’ core audience includes lawmakers, staff, and policy advocates. That audience has expanded to civically engaged citizens. After the launch of My Legislator in January, they were surprised by legislators’ unexpected adoption of it — they’re using it to track colleagues in their districts.
One of the most requested features so far is the ability to track multiple legislators.
Another piece of unexpected feedback from subscribers was that they were surprised at the availability of information. Several even forwarded My Legislator newsletters to their representatives with questions about voting records.
Needless to say, the team is excited about the engagement because it means readers value the content.
When US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived in Chicago, Block Club created a WhatsApp strategy to get news to Chicago’s immigrant community.
