A tool-assisted speedrun of local news.
Tucson Daily Brief is an ongoing experiment in AI-augmented local journalism, by Nicholas De Leon.
There is a thing in video games called a tool-assisted speedrun: a player uses software — frame-by-frame input, save states, automation — to play through a game with a level of precision and speed that no human could achieve in real time. The result isn’t laziness or cheating. It’s a demonstration of what the game makes possible once you stop pretending the constraints of human reflex are the constraints of the medium.
Tucson Daily Brief is that same idea, applied to local news.
The newsroom is one person — me. The tools are large language models, transcription engines, public-data scrapers, schedulers, and a few hundred lines of glue Python. Together, the run reads every agenda packet that drops, listens to every council meeting that streams, scans every public-records filing, and synthesizes what the rest of the Tucson press is reporting — most mornings, before breakfast.
This matters here because Tucson is one of the most under-covered metros in the country relative to its size. The Old Pueblo has more than a million people in its metro area and a handful of beat reporters covering everything from school boards to courts to development. More public business happens here in any given week than the existing outlets can possibly reach. The legacy economics of local news will not support the coverage this city deserves. So I’m running a speedrun instead.
What you’re looking at isn’t the future of local news. It’s one experiment in what that future could look like — when a working journalist treats AI not as a replacement for the work, but as the toolkit that finally lets him cover a city at the depth it deserves.
About the byline
My name is Nicholas De Leon. I’m a longtime technology reporter born and raised in NYC. I moved to Tucson in 2023 and quickly fell in love with the place! By day I’m a Senior Reporter at Consumer Reports and by night I work on TDB as well as a host of other interesting projects. The fastest way to contact me is by email. Tips, corrections, leads, and friendly hellos are all welcome.