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. Every answer links to the transcript passage, the moment in the meeting video and the page of the document it comes from, so you can check it before you rely on it.

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. Ask Townbrief to switch it on; it applies to your newsroom's exports from then on.

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.