The news covers the vote. I cover the room.
I cover what happens at Twin Cities public meetings — who organizes it, what gets said at the mic, and what the news leaves out when it writes the story. Everything I publish comes off the city’s own tape, timestamped, so you never have to take my word for it.
I spent five years inside political campaigns — 2016 to 2021, DC, New York, Virginia, Florida — working for progressive candidates, from knocking doors to running the people who knock them. A 79,160-door field operation that helped flip a Virginia house seat by 27 votes. Two hundred volunteers on a council race. Twenty staff across two sites. I know exactly what a packed council chamber costs to produce, because producing them was my job.
After COVID it was clear there wasn’t a place for me in that movement anymore. So I walked. Sold cars — turned out I was good at it — and figured I was done with politics for good.
Then I settled in Saint Paul and started watching my own city council. I saw an organized campaign work its will on public-safety policy — and I saw the news cover everything about it except who was organizing it and what they actually said at the mic. You don’t spend five years building packed rooms and then fail to recognize one somebody else built. I know this machinery because I used to run it — and nobody covering my city was telling you how it works.
I’m Jewish, and I won’t pretend that’s incidental to why I watch this particular machinery so closely. You deserve to know the stake I bring — that’s more than most coverage tells you about itself.
Saint Paul is where it starts, not where it ends. The same playbook runs in council chambers across the country, and the desk is built to find it there too.
I write the software myself. The pipeline pulls the city’s meeting broadcasts and records, machine-transcribes the tape, fixes what auto-captions mangle, counts what was actually said with published search patterns, and pulls roll-call votes from the city’s own records system. Every quote on this site carries a timestamp that jumps to the same second of the official recording.
The numbers cut whichever way they cut. When the written comment packet on the Flock hearing mentioned Israel zero times, we published the zero. When a claim can’t be verified, it doesn’t air — and when I get something wrong, it gets corrected on the record, not quietly edited. The full methodology is public.
If something happened at a public meeting in your city that the coverage skipped — send it. The most useful tip is specific: the city, the date, and a link to the recording or agenda item. I verify against the official record before anything airs, so a pointer to the tape beats a summary of it.
Reach me on X or through the contact form. Don’t send anyone’s home address or personal contact details — I don’t publish them and I don’t keep them.
Jacob Ramos is an independent journalist and video producer in Saint Paul, Minnesota, covering the organized campaigns shaping local public-safety policy and the gaps in how they’re reported. A former campaign staffer and manager (2016–2021), he built the open records pipeline behind his reporting; every story publishes with timestamped source video, machine-verified counts, and roll-call records.
Available for interviews and commentary on municipal surveillance fights, activist organizing tactics, and local-coverage gaps. The records behind every story are public at /civic.