The Bozeman Brief: a city government news podcast

For a town that cares as much about itself as Bozeman does, it’s surprisingly difficult for a normal person to keep tabs on what city government is doing. Local news is in structural decline more or less everywhere, and Bozeman isn’t exempt. The Chronicle still does real reporting (which I’m grateful for), but its city coverage is mostly limited to the high-profile, controversial City Commission items—which amounts to about 5% of what’s actually happening with local government. The dozen-plus citizen advisory boards—Community Development, Transportation, Sustainability, the TIF and urban renewal boards, and the rest—get almost no public coverage at all. These meeting are where a great deal of the substantive discussion happens but they’re far too voluminous to keep up with. Outside of the Chronicle’s coverage, your only real option is to attend or watch the meetings—and those run two to three hours apiece, with several per week.

The result is a little perverse: the only time most people hear anything about city government is when something blows up. Controversy gets the headline. Meanwhile, the large volume of good, routine, genuinely consequential work the city does—the stuff that doesn’t generate a fight—goes almost entirely unseen.

I love podcasts, and this seemed obvious

I keep up with current events and learn most of what I learn through podcasts. They slot into the parts of the day when your hands are busy and your brain isn’t—a commute, a run, mowing the lawn. Podcasts fill the space between things, or exercise the mind while exercising the body.

So the fix more or less suggested itself. If the problem is that all this information is trapped inside three-hour meetings, the answer is to get it out of the meetings and into the medium people already use on the go.

A near-perfect job for AI

Condensing a long, structured, fairly tedious meeting into a short, predictable summary is close to a textbook case for what current AI does well. The input is hours of recorded audio with multiple speakers and a published agenda. The desired output is tight and consistent: what was on the agenda, what got decided, how people voted, what the public said. It’s high-volume, low-glamour work that no human is realistically going to do for 14 separate bodies every week—which is precisely why this kind of coverage has never existed.

I work with technology, so I built a pipeline to make a podcast. Meeting audio gets pulled from the city’s video portal, transcribed and split by speaker, and handed to Claude to write a two-host conversational recap of the agenda items, decisions, votes, and public comment. The output is a podcast episode, posted within about a day of each meeting.

The Bozeman Brief

The result is The Bozeman Brief: a free podcast that turns each meeting into a roughly five-minute recap. It covers 14 bodies—the Commission, the Charter Study Commission, the MPO, and the citizen advisory boards—so the coverage is comprehensive rather than just the headline votes.

If you subscribe to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle—or you’re the kind of person who would, and who pays attention to local government—this is built for you. It’s the rest of the iceberg under the Chronicle’s city coverage.

The first time you listen to an AI-generated podcast it can feel a little uncanny. If so, give it a couple of episodes before you throw in the towel: once you get used to the delivery format, I think you’ll find the content is surprisingly good.

It’s free on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or you can find everything at bozeman.civiccast.ai. Queue up an episode for your next run, your next lap around the block with the dog, or the drive across town. And if you find it useful, tell a neighbor—the more of us actually paying attention, the better this city works.