Glen Nelson Center Invests in Hamlet
Imagine you are a journalist covering city hall. Your day is spent running between city council and planning commission meetings, sitting in on public hearings, and trying to decipher hundreds of pages of meeting minutes, planning reports, and proposals. It was daunting work twenty years ago, made even more difficult today because there are fewer reporters covering just as many city governments. A journalist once assigned to a single city hall may have to cover a dozen local governments from downtown to the suburbs.
This challenge facing newsrooms across the country is why Glen Nelson Center made a Horizon Fund investment in Hamlet, a company on a mission to revolutionize the way communities, businesses, and journalists access and utilize local information. This early-stage investment is part of Glen Nelson Center’s commitment to Press Forward, a national movement to strengthen communities by reinvigorating local news.
Founded in 2022 by Sunil Rajaraman, Hamlet was launched after a brief dive into local politics alerted him to the immense challenges of accessing public data.
“When I ran for city council, I learned an enormous amount about what makes my town tick,” said Rajaraman. “I discovered online discourse getting more inflammatory and polarizing, little agreement about facts, and a local newspaper struggling to stay alive. I decided to launch Hamlet to address the disconnect between the enormous amount of local data available and my community's ability to use it for good.”
Hamlet pulls large volumes of data from public meetings held by local governments, where information is often buried in 5-hour long meeting recordings and 100-page PDF documents. Hamlet then uses artificial intelligence (AI) to convert this complex data into easily understandable and searchable insights.
““I decided to launch Hamlet to address the disconnect between the enormous amount of local data available and my community’s ability to use it for good.””
Using Hamlet, a reporter can search for every time public officials have mentioned a project, proposal, or policy in any public meeting and how they eventually voted. The reporter can see how government officials’ stances on issues may change over the course of years and bring light to potential contradictions between what elected officials say and the decisions they make. Hamlet acts like a reporter that has attended every city council meeting for decades, taken detailed notes, and spotted trends for journalists to dig into through their reporting.
“Hamlet demonstrates the real promise of AI to help sift through mountains of data to help local journalists do their job,” said Jeff Freeland Nelson, executive director of Glen Nelson Center. “This investment will help Hamlet become a critical part of the infrastructure of future newsrooms, ensuring communities have access to the news they need, both to celebrate what is working and to hold local leaders accountable for what needs to change.”
Stay tuned for more news about Hamlet and other Horizon Fund investments.
