The Philadelphia Inquirer built Scrape, an AI tool to surface hyperlocal news

I like this so much. Maybe I’m romanticizing but hoping tools like this give local news a chance against monopolies like Sinclair Broadcasting.

> Early on, the team tried to balance quality with the high cost of searching many small, scattered sources. They discovered that prompting can implicitly control search depth and behavior, but only after trial and error.

I don't understand the cost here. The number of sources should be relatively tiny - it's not a general Internet search. The amount of data scraped would seem to be relatively tiny - how much data is there on suburban-county, PA?