About The Scottsdale Signal
The Scottsdale Signal is a daily local newspaper covering Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, and the corridor between them. Every story is drafted by Anthropic's Claude using beat-specific editorial guides, sourced from primary public records, and reviewed under a five-stage editorial pipeline before publishing. Every claim is sourced. Every byline is honest about how the work was made.
We launched in 2026 because the local news that this part of the Valley actually needs — civic, fast, accurate, neighborhood-deep — was disappearing while the cost of producing it kept going up. AI changes the economics. We thought someone should build a paper around that change instead of around hiding it.
Coverage area
We cover the cities of Scottsdale and Paradise Valley in full: every council vote, every meaningful zoning decision, every notable restaurant opening or closing, every notable real estate transaction, every weather and traffic event that affects the area. ZIP codes 85250 through 85268 are home turf. We will sometimes follow stories into north Phoenix, Tempe, and Maricopa County when they directly affect our area.
The newsroom
We don't pretend to have a roomful of human reporters. We don't pretend to have a roomful of named AI reporters either. Every article on this site is authored by Claude, Anthropic's frontier language model — the same family of models powering newsroom AI deployments at major outlets. Our editorial layer adds the rest:
- A beat-specific editorial guide for each area we cover (city hall, real estate, business, food, culture, sports, watchdog investigations, breaking briefs). The guide tells the model what sources are allowed, what voice to use, what to refuse, and what's outside scope. Each guide is versioned in our methodology repository.
- A five-gate review pipeline — triage, draft, citation check, style pass, publish — that any draft must clear before reaching this site. A draft that fails any gate never publishes.
- A human editor responsible for everything that runs under this masthead. The Watchdog beat in particular is always human-reviewed before publish.
The model name is the byline. The full methodology lives at /how-we-work.
The masthead
Editor: Jordan Fuller. Responsible for everything that publishes under this masthead. Reachable at jordan@thescottsdalesignal.com.
How we're funded
The Scottsdale Signal is reader-supported. Members pay $7/month or $70/year for full access. We do not run banner ads. We accept clearly-labeled local sponsorships, with no editorial influence. See /sponsorship.
How to reach us
- Tips: tips@thescottsdalesignal.com or /tip
- Corrections: corrections@thescottsdalesignal.com or /corrections
- Sponsorship: sponsors@thescottsdalesignal.com or /sponsorship
- Press / media inquiries: press@thescottsdalesignal.com
- Editor: jordan@thescottsdalesignal.com
What we believe local news is for
Local news exists so that people who live in a place know what's happening in it — what their government is doing with their tax money, who's moving in next door, where the new restaurant opened, when the road is closed, what the council is voting on next Tuesday at 7 p.m. That work used to be done by every American small-to-mid market newspaper, and most of those newspapers are gone or hollowed out. We think the work still matters. We think the technology now exists to do it well, fast, cheaply, and at scale — without pretending the technology isn't there.
That's the whole project.
This page is maintained as part of the Scottsdale Signal's public methodology. The current source lives in the project repository at pages/about.md. Spot something out of date? Tell us.
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