The Common News now has a public API.
Developers can use it to query local government records from communities across the United States, including municipalities, meetings, published summaries, agenda items, and public meeting documents.
The API is available at api.thecommonnews.org, and the developer portal is at developers.thecommonnews.org. It is read-only, documented, and free at launch.
The launch on September 10, 2026 is an important step for The Common News because it changes what the product can be. Until now, the primary way to use the data was through our own web experience. The API makes the underlying civic information available to other builders too.
Why Open an API?
Local government information is useful in more places than one website.
A journalist might want to monitor meetings across several cities. A researcher might want to study how often certain issues appear on agendas. A civic organization might want to build alerts around a committee or project. A developer might want to create a local-government tool that we have not thought of yet.
Those projects should not all need to build their own scrapers, source integrations, and data-cleaning pipelines.
The Common News already does much of the difficult work of collecting, organizing, and publishing local government information. The API creates a second way for that work to be useful: instead of only reading the finished product, developers can build with the structured public records behind it.
That is the larger idea. The Common News should be a product people can use directly, but it should also become infrastructure other products can build on.
What You Can Build With It
The API is designed for anyone who wants to work with local government information without building their own collection and cleanup system.
A journalist could monitor meetings across several cities and quickly find new summaries, agenda items, or decisions. A researcher could study which topics appear most often in public proceedings or compare how different communities organize their meetings. A civic organization could build alerts around a committee, project, or local issue.
Developers could also build:
- local-government newsletters
- meeting and committee trackers
- issue-specific research tools
- civic dashboards
- public-record search experiences
- applications that compare how different cities meet, vote, and make decisions
The API includes municipalities, meetings, published summaries, agenda items, and public meeting documents. Records can be filtered by place, date, committee, topic, and meeting status, making it possible to build focused tools instead of downloading an undifferentiated archive.
The first version is intentionally read-only and focused on published public information. That gives developers a clear foundation while leaving room for more endpoints, richer comparisons, and additional civic applications over time.
What Comes Next
The first release is a foundation, not the final shape of the platform.
The most interesting possibilities are higher-level tools built on top of the API:
- city and committee monitoring
- local government newsletters
- research datasets
- issue-specific alerts
- comparisons between how different cities meet, vote, and make decisions
- new civic applications that are not tied to The Common News interface
The more cities and proceedings the system covers, the more valuable those tools can become. A developer should be able to build on The Common News without needing to understand every source website or municipal publishing system behind the data.
The Common News began as a way to make local government easier to follow. The public API is the next version of that idea: make the information usable not only for readers, but for anyone building tools that help people understand their communities.
Developers can read the API documentation or create an API account.