The Winchendon Courier is published by Winchendon Media Co. and built on FAHM, software we developed here in Winchendon, Massachusetts, for local businesses and community organizations. This page says plainly how the paper is made: where computers do the legwork, and where a person decides.
We go to the meetings — all of them
Town boards, school committees and other public meetings are recorded. Our system collects each public recording and turns the speech into a written transcript. A story from a meeting links to its recording, so you can hear exactly what was said, at the moment it was said.
AI helps write; a person decides what runs
The first draft of a meeting story is written with the help of AI models that run locally, on our own servers — not on a large online service, and the recordings do not leave our systems to be written up. An editor checks the draft against the recording, corrects it and approves it before it runs.
Some short briefs from meetings in neighboring towns are posted on their own, without an editor's review first. Each one says so at the top and links the original recording, so you can check it yourself. Every story tells you how it was made.
Who is speaking
Our system learns the voices at a town's meetings over several meetings. An editor confirms who a voice belongs to before a name is attached to it, and that confirmation is what lets the paper name a speaker the next time.
Quotes
We never turn a paraphrase into a quote. When a story puts words in quotation marks, they are the words the person said on the recording. If the recording is unclear, we do not quote it.
Errors can still happen inadvertently — a word misheard, a name attached to the wrong voice. When they do, tell us at editor@thewinchendoncourier.com or with the "Report an error" button on the story, and we will correct it and note the correction on the story. See thewinchendoncourier.com/fr/corrections.
Listening, and other languages
The "Listen" button reads a story aloud in a computer-generated voice. The Spanish, Portuguese and French editions are machine-translated from the English, and each one says so; the English story is the one of record.
Where the rest comes from
- Weather: the National Weather Service.
- Road and traffic alerts: the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT).
- The paper's printed past: our own archive of printed editions, and the scans of the old paper kept by the Beals Memorial Library, which we link to and never copy.
- School lunch menus and calendars: the schools' own published menus and calendars, linked.
Questions
Write to editor@thewinchendoncourier.com.
Last updated October 7, 2026