About Katy Area News

Katy Area News is a local news site covering the Katy, TX area — the Katy Independent School District boundary (spanning Harris, Fort Bend, and Waller counties), the Katy City Council and Planning & Zoning Commission, and the Fort Bend and Harris county commissioners courts, filtered to items that matter to Katy-area residents. It's run by one person, Marty Ballard, with AI doing a meaningful share of the drafting work. This page explains exactly how, so you can weigh what you read accordingly.

The daily brief

Every morning, software gathers headlines from local and regional news outlets and government press pages, filters out anything that isn't plausibly relevant to the Katy area, and asks an AI model to pick up to ten of the most notable items and write a short, neutral summary of each — always linking back to the original reporting. This is the one part of the site that publishes automatically, without a human reading it first. It never quotes or reproduces source articles at length; it summarizes and links out. If you spot an error in a brief, it's fixed as soon as it's flagged.

Meeting coverage

For city council, school board, and county commissioners court meetings, software downloads the public meeting video, transcribes it, and asks an AI model to draft an AP-style news article from the transcript — leading with votes, money, contracts, and zoning decisions, and flagging anything the transcript leaves ambiguous. Nothing from this process publishes automatically. Every draft is reviewed, fact-checked against the video and agenda, edited, and explicitly approved by a human editor before it goes live. The same is true of "What to Watch" meeting previews, drafted from published agendas ahead of a meeting.

How to tell what's AI-touched

Every page on this site carries a short disclosure line at the top of the story, driven by how it was produced: written by AI and published without pre-review (the daily brief only), drafted by AI and edited/approved by a human before publishing, or written by a human without AI drafting.

What this site doesn't do

No comments, no accounts, no site search, no ads, and no visitor tracking, at least for now. If that changes, this page will say so.

Questions or corrections

Reach the editor at marty@pillar-soft.com.