The Capital Examiner

Our Mission

The Capital Examiner was created to fill a gap we observed in local news reporting in the Capital Region. That gap was reporting rooted in data, specifically data collected by local municipalities, such as the number of speeding tickets issued, updates to property taxes, location of and types of crimes occuring, and so on. Our goal with every story is to begin by presenting the data and then applying math and reasoning to draw conclusions, reporting each decision along the way. By providing in-depth, data-driven coverage of the governance, developments, and complex issues facing our Capital Region we hope to better inform our readers with facts that they can use to help better make decisions that impact their lives. At times, we use the data presented to inform our editorial positions on the direction a particular municipality, agency, or elected official should take.

Our core belief is that local news matters. This conviction extends beyond The Capital Examiner to embrace other local journalistic efforts that cover arts, activities, events, food, music, politics, sports, and more. We believe everyone, from larger institutions to individual reporters, has a role to play in providing news to our shared community.

Q. & A.

Do you use AI to write your stories?

The short answer is NO, we do not use AI to write our stories.

Going a little deeper, authors take a lot of pride in analyzing the data we get and drawing out neat pieces of information from it. To then turn around and let a large language model interpret our analytical results and report on that would like we're being robbed on of some pride-of-ownership. Furthermore, our experience with using large language models typically results in authors needed to invest a lot of time to rewriting and editing, therefore, it's often easier starting from scratch.

Where do you get your data?

We tend to use two primary sources of data: FOIL requests and open data. It's our fundamental belief that data collected by the governemnet for the purpose of goverance, such as incident data collected by a police department, parking ticket revenue and locations where tickets were issued, speed camera data, etc., should be open and readily available to the community, not a opaque item referenced to by select public sector employees to push their agenda or narrative.

Will you provide access to your data?

Ultimately, it is up to the owners of the data if they wish to disciminate it. We stronly believe that all data obtained through FOIL requests should be made available upon request.; however, we will not require that any author must turn over data. Often, FOIL requests take a lot of time and effort, and the author might have future plans with that data that extend beyond the single story presented in The Capital Examiner.

Where do your story ideas come from?

We live in the Capital District so we tend to focus our stores on diving deeper into a particular subject we find interest, from property taxes to crime, election results and trends to campaign financial disclosures. We like to think that if we find the story and data interesting, others will too. This is why it's important to us that if you have an interesting idea, we'd love to hear from you!

Are you experts on the topics you report on?

No. Gererally speaking, we are not experts on the stories we write here. What we pride ourselves on is looking at data without any preconcieved notion for what trends to expct, or how the data should look. We hope that having this approach leads to unbiased reporting of facts. We hope that the information we write about inspires a better understanding of how local governemnet are operating.

We strive to be transparent in our reporting and our processes. Read our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for more details.