No matter what city you live in, your statehouse matters.
State legislators make the rules on taxes, housing, wage laws, even things you might not think about — like which uses of AI imagery are legal and illegal.
That’s why our team at NEWSWELL jumped at the chance last week to join a team at CalMatters for an insider tour of a reporting tool that can help us understand all that in new ways.
CalMatters is a fellow nonprofit newsroom devoted to making government in California more transparent and accountable. Their team, along with scientists at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, spent years building a complex set of systems that track the California legislature: every word spoken at a hearing, every vote cast by a lawmaker, every campaign contribution dollar spent. They call this tool Digital Democracy.
Last week, journalists from our California newsrooms, and others from newsrooms across the state, spent two days in Sacramento working hands-on to learn the system.
Now, as insiders, we get early flags of the unusual scenarios that might signal a news story. This gives NEWSWELL’s California newsrooms a head start at covering local issues that matter — whether it’s housing policy or government ethics — and at keeping tabs on their state senators and assemblymembers.
Our thanks to our hosts at CalMatters, including CEO Neil Chase, Editor in Chief Kristen Go, senior editor David Lesher, and especially to lead reporter Ryan Sabalow.
Over two days, Sabalow also taught local reporters some of the realities that help drive the California Capitol: so-called “juice committees,” the way legislators can dodge having to vote on a tough issue and “the undemocratic processes giving special interest groups an edge.”
The technology inside Digital Democracy is remarkable. But there’s another reason it matters, and for a journalist, this is a bittersweet reality.
The corps of local reporters based in the state capital is a fraction of what it once was. Local newspapers across the state used to have their own dedicated reporters in Sacramento. Most of those are gone now.
For the local newsrooms, that’s a lot of news that isn’t being covered — and a lot of secret influence that isn’t being found.
Fortunately, Digital Democracy gives us the technology to change that. As our partners at CalMatters put it, the system turns every reporter into a Capitol reporter — no matter what city they live in.
Can innovation help change the trajectory of news coverage? We think so. NEWSWELL is founded on this idea, building new support systems to help local newsrooms and their communities thrive.
With every partnership like this one, we get one step closer to that reality.
This update originally appeared in our Jan. 30, 2026, newsletter. This version has been lightly edited for clarity.