Disclosure: this notice is from The Austin’s owner and publisher, about its own operations. It is not independent reporting.
What The Austin is
The Austin launched in 2024 as part of the Nexcom Media network. It is a free local-information service: software monitors identified Austin sources, publishes short attributed items about their reporting, and links readers back to the original. As of July 24, 2026 our sitemap lists 456 summaries drawn from 90 outlets — KXAN, KVUE, CBS Austin, FOX 7 Austin, the Austin American-Statesman, Community Impact, UT Austin News and official City of Austin and Austin ISD feeds among them. Every outlet is listed with its article count at /sources. The surviving archive begins in January 2025; earlier items were among those unpublished in the review described below.
What The Austin is not
There is no staffed newsroom in Austin and no Nexcom employee based in Austin. We produce no original field reporting — no reporters at council meetings, no interviews, no investigations. The reporting behind any story here was done by the outlet we credit.
What is automated and what people do
Software drafts the summaries. People select the sources, set the editorial rules the system follows, investigate reported problems, and issue corrections. Not every article receives individual human review before publication. We disclose that because “AI-assisted and human-supervised” should mean exactly what it says — and every article carries a machine-readable provenance record in its page source where prepublicationHumanReview reads false. You can check any article on the site.
How we link
Measured across the whole archive, about 56% of our summaries link straight to the publisher. The rest resolve to a Google News item we cannot unwrap, so the reader lands on Google instead of the outlet. We treat that as a defect and are working on it.
Bylines and credit
The structured-data author on every article is “The Austin Editorial Team” — never a source journalist. Where the source feed names the reporter who did the work, we publish that as the source’s credit: attribution, not affiliation. Those journalists do not work for us, do not contribute to or review anything here, and we did not ask them. Any journalist who wants their name off our pages can write to editor@nexcom.media and we will remove it.
The July 2026 archive review
During a July 2026 platform migration we reviewed The Austin’s legacy archive. Of 749 legacy articles, 12 retained recoverable direct-source records and were kept; 737 did not and were unpublished. The absence of a recoverable source record does not by itself establish that an article was false — it means we could not validate its provenance under our current standard, so we removed it rather than leave it up. The same review removed an inaccurate founding-date statement and ended template-generated pen-name author profiles, which earlier versions of this site used. Those entries are logged at /corrections.
What our short items actually are
This matters and we would rather state it than have it discovered. When we publish a short item — usually one paragraph — the text is generally the outlet’s own feed summary, trimmed to length, not something we rewrote. We measured this on 24 items in July 2026 against the original reporting: most shared a long run of wording with the source, and about two-thirds carried over the source’s opening sentence. Longer pieces on this site are written here and do not track the source’s wording. We are changing the short path so that what we publish is either genuinely our own words or a clearly marked quotation, and we are reviewing what is already published. Until that is finished, treat a one-paragraph item here as the outlet’s own words, credited to them, with a link to their story — and if you are that outlet and you object, our rights and takedown page will get it removed.
Photographs
Photographs belong to the outlets that made them. Image references on our pages resolve by redirect to the publisher's own server: /imgp returns an HTTP 302 with zero bytes from us, so the publisher's server delivers the file and logs the request. Anyone can confirm that with a single request. We do not have, and do not claim, any license from the outlets we summarize. Our position is that linking to reporting and publishing short attributed summaries of it does not require one. We will remove or amend any image or item an outlet asks us to remove or amend, promptly, without requiring a formal legal notice — see our rights and takedown page.
Not a substitute
This region is served by working reporters and newsrooms. This publication is not a substitute for them. Its intended role is to help readers find and navigate identified local reporting and official information, and to send them to the outlet that did the work.
Scrutiny
Questions from a local reporter accelerated parts of this work. We welcome that scrutiny, and we would rather publish these limits ourselves than have them discovered.
Money
Free to read and funded by the founders. These sites have generated no revenue. No display advertising runs on any page and we do not solicit or accept reader donations. We publish an AI-licensing declaration at /.well-known/ai-paywall.json; all pricing in it is zero and every payment method is disabled.
