The Lexington Times
An open-source local newsroom for Lexington, Kentucky. Aggregation, original reporting, civic data, and public-records tools — built in the open, for the public.
The Lexington Times is primarily a news aggregation service, complemented by original reporting and commentary. Over the past year it has grown into something broader: a civic-data engine, a searchable archive of every LFUCG meeting, public-records and campaign-finance dashboards, and a real-time map of LFD incidents, crime reports, and flood gauges. All of it is open source, transparent by default, and built around one simple idea: local information should be free, easy to find, and easy to share.
Where to find us
lexingtonky.news
Daily news, commentary, meeting agendas, and the rotating hero of top local stories.
The archivefeeds.lexingtonky.news
Every AI-generated brief and meeting recap, searchable, with Markdown, JSON, and an MCP server for AI agents.
The meeting archivemeetings.lexingtonky.news
Every LFUCG council and committee meeting — transcribed, summarized, and searchable, with an MCP server so AI agents can query it directly.
Republishing our content
Original Lexington Times reporting — our investigations, columns, and features — is licensed CC BY-ND 4.0. You may republish it free, including commercially, as long as it runs in full and unaltered, credits The Lexington Times, and links to the original. Licensed articles carry the notice at the bottom.
Items we aggregate or summarize from other publishers are not covered: those rights belong to the original publisher, so credit and link to them.
A civic-tech project, in plain English
The Lexington Times is a passion project by a Lexington dad who believes good local information should be free, public, and easy to find.
Built in the open
The site, the maps, the dashboards, and the archive all run on public data and code that anyone can read. If you’re curious how a story gets generated, how a meeting recap gets written, or how the LFD incident map updates, the whole pipeline is documented — and you’re welcome to poke at it.
Transparent about how it’s made
A lot of what you’ll read here is AI-assisted — aggregated from public records, government meetings, court filings, and other local newsrooms, then summarized and laid out automatically. Every article is labeled, sourced, and links back to the originals. No mystery sources, no hidden authorship.
For the public, by a neighbor
This isn’t a corporate newsroom. It’s a side project run by someone who lives here, raises kids here, and just wants Lexington to have great civic information available 24/7 — the kind that helps you understand your city, follow your local government, and stay aware of what’s happening on your block.
Bias toward transparency
If we have a bias, it’s toward open records, open meetings, plain language, and making civic life easier to follow. Where we cover government, we try to do it the way a curious neighbor would — respectfully, accurately, and with a preference for the public’s right to know.
Open source by default
The paper runs on public data and public code. Our maps, civic-data engine, and meeting-transcript archive are built from scratch by Lexington locals and documented in the open. If you want to see how it works — the stack, the guardrails, the humans behind it — start here:
Read the technical explainer →