Cover your town.
Operators are local people who find out what’s really happening where they live, tell their neighbors, and help their town’s businesses grow. No press badge required.
Become an OperatorWho Operators are
Neighbors. A former camera guy, a salesman, a nephew, a friend of thirty years. Operators aren’t hired from outside. They come from the town they cover, and they already know the streets, the businesses and the people.
What an Operator does
1. Reports the record.
Operators work through the Community Playbook: 40 topics from recycling and trash to property taxes, flooding, schools and water. For each one they read the budget, go see it, ask the official, file for the records, and publish what’s proven.
2. Runs the town’s newsletter.
Every town gets its own Sunday edition of the Herald, with its own Facebook and Instagram. The Operator is the local voice behind it.
3. Brings neighbors along.
Operators run small groups of residents and students through the same playbook, so the work outlives any one person. Students work at three levels, Foundation, Builder and Master, and the capstone is speaking at public comment with their own data.
4. Helps local businesses get seen.
Operators call on the businesses in their town and set them up on Glass, our tool that keeps a business’s Facebook and Instagram posting on its own. That’s how the work pays (see Unrivaled Marketing Solutions, below).
What it looks like in practice
In Deer Park, the first module asked a simple question: does our recycling actually get recycled? The budget had no line for it, there’s no curbside pickup, and the city’s own flyer had placeholder text printed in the middle. So on October 1, 2026 we filed a public-records request for the contracts, haul tickets and tonnage. That’s the job: ask, look, request, report.
What you get
- A cockpit with your town’s businesses, your call list, and your records requests in one place.
- The playbook and every module’s questions, field steps and math.
- Your town’s newsletter and social accounts, built and run on the Council’s system.
- Training and backup from the Council, including help with every records request.
What we ask of you
- Live in or near the town you cover.
- Hold every fact to its source.
- Keep reporting and opinion in separate pieces.
- Treat clerks, officials and neighbors with respect. You’ll be back.
Where Operators work now
- Deer Park (home base)
- North Austin
- Pasadena
- Pearland
- Pflugerville
- Richmond
- Rosenberg
- Sugar Land
- West Palm Beach (FL)
- Houston’s Nigerian diaspora community (Strong Towns Nigeria)
Don’t see your town? That’s the point. Tell us where you are.