#42. Weekly AI For Newsroom Roundup. Local First Setup

Hello, this is Sergei.

My vacation is not over yet, but still... These days, I had some time to clean up the dev folder on my laptop and finally implement my favorite local-first approach for the tools I built for myself.

My desktop task manager; a Telegram assistant for task management, Google Meet management, Last.fm weekly/monthly stats, all my websites stats, AI For Newsroom and Sevenly management; my book-writing ecosystem (I hope to finish my book someday, huh) — all these tools were cloud-based. But I asked my self: are there any reasons to keep them outside my laptop. There’s actually no point in paying for hosting and databases and subscriptions if all this is just for me.

Here’s the setup (read and download it here, it is LLM ready, so you can just feed it to Cursor, it will do all the things): PostgreSQL as a local database (I actually cloned all my Supabase schemas and moved them locally) + PM2 to keep my tools running. No Docker, because all these desktop tools are browser-based. I don’t like adding extra layers when we already have a very good shell for a lot of tools: the browser.

And I think this local-first approach could be a big deal for newsrooms, especially small ones.

There are several reasons. First, most newsrooms already have good enough desktops and laptops to run many of these apps and tools with shared access inside the newsroom, so there’s often no real need to pay for hosting and cloud infrastructure (or for SaaS apps). Imagine having all your newsroom's knowledge base / brain in one place, locally!

Second, copy. With AI, we can now recreate almost any tool or app and adapt it to our specific needs—without all the extra functionality we don't use but still have to pay for. We can build exactly what we need. So here the question is not 'how to build', but 'what we need'.

And third, security. At least for internal information, data can stay with the newsroom instead of being stored somewhere in the cloud. Not everything has to be local, of course, but a lot more probably could be.