AI-powered civic infrastructure that moves readers from informed to involved — and helps community newsrooms become a force for democratic participation.
Get in touchA reader finishes a story about a utility rate hike, a data center threatening local water supplies, or an air quality violation that went unpunished. They're informed. They may even be outraged. And then they close the tab — because nothing in the story told them there was a public hearing next Tuesday, a comment deadline on Friday, or an elected official whose phone number is public record.
That gap isn't a minor inconvenience. It's a democratic failure. Research consistently shows that civic knowledge is the single strongest predictor of civic participation — people don't disengage because they don't care, they disengage because no one handed them a pathway. When Planet Detroit started pairing accountability stories with plain-language guides to participation, readers showed up to township meetings and filed regulatory comments for the first time in their lives. They told us: "I didn't know I could do this."
Every tool starts inside Planet Detroit's newsroom — designed to solve real editorial problems, not hypothetical ones. If it doesn't work for our reporters, it doesn't leave the lab.
We pilot with peer newsrooms before anything is called finished. Real-world feedback from real editors shapes every iteration. Our tools earn their reputation in the field.
Our primary focus is community newsrooms serving Great Lakes communities — though our tools are built to travel wherever independent local journalism operates.
We build shared infrastructure, not proprietary products. Every tool we release is open-source and fully documented — designed to be accessible to newsrooms of any size and technical capacity.
Local journalism tells readers what's happening. The Civic Action Builder helps them understand what they can do about it.
Using AI, the tool analyzes published articles and automatically generates civic engagement resources — relevant public meetings, comment deadlines, elected officials, and local organizations — directly embedded in the story. Editors review everything before it publishes. AI assists; journalists decide.
We are currently piloting the Civic Action Builder with a select group of community newsrooms across the country, with more partners joining in 2026. Our work has attracted early recognition from national journalism innovation funders.
Small teams covering local government, environment, and civic life with limited staff and no dedicated tech resources.
Newsrooms whose beats intersect directly with regulatory agencies, public hearings, and community health decisions.
Mission-driven organizations that prioritize service over scale — and need tools that reflect those values.
Our home base and primary testing ground, with particular depth in Michigan civic infrastructure and environmental coverage.
The Civic Action Builder is the first tool out of the lab — not the last. We're building a pipeline of tools that solve the specific problems community newsrooms face every day: making coverage findable, making civic data usable, and making public information accessible — without requiring a dedicated data team.
A reader types "Is my tap water safe?" and gets every relevant story we've published — regardless of how it was worded. Ask Planet Detroit is a semantic search tool that understands meaning, not just keywords, so readers can ask real questions and find real answers buried across years of coverage.
You just read a story about air quality in your neighborhood. Now what? The Organization Directory connects readers to the civic and advocacy organizations actually working on the issues in our coverage — tagged by issue area and geography, searchable by zip code, and embeddable directly in stories so the path from awareness to action is one click.
A turnkey training program that equips community members to report and write their own neighborhood profiles — with structured curriculum, coaching support, and publication in a professional newsroom. The Lab pairs participants with editors and coaches across a 9-week program covering interviewing, profile writing, fact-checking, ethics, and social video. We're developing the model now with our Detroit cohort, with the goal of packaging it as a replicable toolkit any community newsroom can run.
Permit violations, inspection failures, enforcement actions — the data is public, but it's scattered across dozens of agency databases and almost never in a format anyone can use. Accountability Data Trackers automatically aggregate and visualize regulatory activity so reporters and readers can see patterns without chasing raw records.
Every week, public meetings happen, comment deadlines pass, and civic opportunities close — and most people never hear about them. The Civic Digest Generator pulls upcoming meetings, deadlines, and participation windows from a newsroom's coverage area and packages them as a reader-ready newsletter or standalone page. No one misses the vote that affects their block.
"Readers tell us: 'I didn't know I could do this.' That's the gap we're building infrastructure to close — one newsroom at a time."
Planet Detroit is an independent nonprofit environmental newsroom founded in 2019, operating with a small, dedicated team. We have earned recognition for health and environmental reporting, engagement journalism, and business sustainability from SPJ Detroit, INN, and LION Publishers.
The PD Civic Action Lab grows from that foundation. Our founder spent 15 years as a community planner for Oakland County before building Planet Detroit — giving the lab an unusually deep understanding of how civic infrastructure actually works, and what information residents need to use it. The Civic Action Builder is not a prototype awaiting real-world testing. It is already deployed, already in use, and already helping readers show up.
Planet Detroit has received institutional support from the MacArthur Foundation, Kresge Foundation, Joyce Foundation, Erb Family Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Press Forward, Google News Initiative, Report for America, Patrice K. Aaron Family Foundation, Porter Family Foundation, Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, American Press Institute, Pulitzer Center, MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship, and NewsMatch.