A newsletter prototype presented at the October 28 AI Tinkerers Coachella Valley meetup gives a human editor the job of choosing which California opinion pieces are intended to reach an audience of legislators and their staff.
Noah Duesterberg-Chavez demonstrated California Opinion Pulse at the Palm Desert Entrepreneurial Resource Center. His slides describe a pipeline that gathers published opinion content, produces a shortlist for editorial review, and prepares the selected material for a weekly newsletter. His public talk description identifies California legislators and their staff as the intended readers.
The workflow starts with a Codex scraper and a file of approximately 200–250 candidate articles. Those candidates go into Airtable, where an editor chooses the week’s 11 most relevant pieces. The selection is exported to another file, Codex generates the HTML, and the newsletter moves to GrowthZone for deployment, according to the deck.
The technical appendix describes a collector configured with 79 active sources, using RSS feeds or web pages according to the source. Date checks and duplicate detection are part of the collection process. Those checks address the incoming material; the choice of what readers should see sits with the editor.
Duesterberg-Chavez identifies the California News Publishers Association as the client. His stated aim is to use member publications’ opinion content to raise the association’s visibility among Sacramento legislators, staff and other interest groups. CNPA describes its work as supporting news publishers and advocating on legislation affecting the industry.
He also brought two questions to the room. First, how fragile is the workflow as the internet changes? Second, how will newsletter readers access opinion pieces behind paywalls? The slides ask whether RSS might help with access, but present that as an open question rather than an established solution.
In a LinkedIn post supplied to AICV News by the event organizer, attendee Felina Danalis highlighted his journalism work. “Keeping experienced humans with great judgment at the center is key,” she wrote. The review step in the slides gives that observation a concrete reference: an editor choosing 11 pieces from a much larger candidate pool.
For Inland Empire journalists, the project offers a specific example of automating collection and preparation while retaining human story selection. It also leaves a distribution question to resolve: whether newsletter readers can access the full articles selected for them.
The presentation describes the client as seeking board approval and names January 1, 2027 as the planned launch. It does not establish that approval has been granted, that the newsletter has launched, or that the workflow has delivered measured results.
The event recap acknowledges AI Coachella Valley, Structured and Palm Desert ERC. Duesterberg-Chavez used the gathering to demonstrate the prototype and ask other builders to examine the problems still ahead of it.
Relationship disclosure: Sat Singh co-organized the event and leads AI Coachella Valley, which publishes AICV News. The workflow and launch plan above are Duesterberg-Chavez’s account; AICV News has not independently tested the system or confirmed its approval status with CNPA.