Townbrief Desk terms

What Desk is

Townbrief Desk is a free research workspace for newsrooms. It searches the public record Townbrief keeps for Massachusetts cities and towns (meeting transcripts and video, agendas, packets and minutes, and state records) and compares how neighboring towns handled the same question.

Desk is a research tool that points to the original record. Each answer links to the record it comes from, so you can check it before you rely on it: the transcript passage and the moment in the meeting video where the meeting was recorded, and the page of the document where the town's documents are on file.

What your newsroom may do

Your newsroom may read, rewrite, edit and combine Desk research with its own reporting, and publish the result in its own publication, in print, online, in email and on air, including commercially.

This license is nonexclusive. Facts and public records belong to no one, and other newsrooms may use Desk on the same terms.

What your newsroom may not do

You may not use Desk, its keys or its exports to copy the record in bulk, to build or improve a database, product or service that offers research, alerts or news on Massachusetts town government to others, or to train or tune an AI model. Automated collection beyond your newsroom's own reporting is not allowed. Townbrief may limit, suspend or end an account that does any of this.

Credit

Published work that uses free Desk research carries the credit line "Research: Townbrief" with the link to the evidence. Desk exports include both for you, and the evidence link stays on.

White label: the paid Desk plan, $99 a month per newsroom, lets your newsroom publish without the credit and raises its fair-use limits. It starts once your newsroom signs a white-label agreement and applies to your newsroom's exports from then on.

The paid plan

The paid plan costs $99 a month per newsroom, plus $20 a month for each person over 5. Townbrief bills by invoice, monthly in advance, and each invoice is due upon receipt.

The paid plan renews each month automatically until it is ended. Either side may end it at the end of a paid month by written notice, and an email counts: to dave@townbrief.com from your newsroom's owner, or to the owner from Townbrief. Notice received before the first day of the next month ends the plan at the end of the current one. Paid months are not refunded.

When the plan ends, your newsroom moves to free Desk and its limits. New work that uses Desk research carries the credit, and work already published stays as published. Evidence pages show the Townbrief credit again, and any evidence link your newsroom turned off opens again.

Your searches

Your newsroom's searches are saved in its Desk account so your team can reopen them, and everyone on your account can see them. Townbrief keeps saved items while your account is open. Your newsroom may ask Townbrief by email to delete its saved items. Copies in backups age out on their own schedule.

Townbrief's staff screen shows your account details and counts of what you have saved and exported. It does not show what you searched. The words of a search do exist on Townbrief's systems, in its database and backups, and for a short time in its server logs. Dave Watkins runs those systems and can reach them. He does not read them, no one else at Townbrief does, and Townbrief's reporting never uses them, unless the law requires it.

When you run a comparison, the issue you type also goes to OpenAI so Desk can match it by meaning. Searches of transcripts and documents do not.

Each saved item has an evidence page. It is not listed anywhere, and only someone with its link can open it. The page shows the item's title and your newsroom's name, so a link you print in a story shows both.

Your responsibility

Your newsroom decides what it publishes and is responsible for it. Check each finding against the original record (the transcript passage, the video, the document page) before you publish it.

Fair use

Desk is free under a fair-use limit. The daily limits apply to the newsroom as a whole, across all of its keys: 75 research calls and 15 town comparisons a day on free Desk. Each key may make up to 15 calls a minute. A newsroom may have up to 5 people on Desk, the owner included, and may hold one workspace key and up to 3 personal keys for its own AI assistant or scripts. The paid Desk plan ($99 a month per newsroom) raises these limits; Townbrief Monitor serves professional volume.

Desk returns passages and document pages around what you searched for, not whole records.

Keys are for your newsroom's staff. Do not share them outside the newsroom or resell access.

Coverage

Desk covers the Massachusetts towns listed on Townbrief's coverage pages, with the record sources and update frequency stated there. Where a town has no record on a question, Desk says so.

As is

Desk is provided as is: free Desk at no charge under its fair-use limit, the paid plan at $99 a month per newsroom. Townbrief may change or end the service, change these terms with a new version (your newsroom is asked to accept it before its next research), or suspend an account that breaks them.