If you subscribed to Sanpete Serves expecting government meeting recaps, you’ve noticed they stopped showing up. I owe you an explanation, and I’d rather give you the real one than something tidy.
Sanpete Serves is going on hiatus.
Here’s the honest reason. From the day I launched this, the whole thing ran on AI. It had to. One person cannot sit in every council chamber and commission room and coalition meeting scattered across a county this size, then turn all of it into clean reporting. So I leaned on AI tools to transcribe the recordings and help me shape them into the recaps you’ve been reading. That was the engine under the hood.
The longer I ran it, the less I could ignore what that engine actually costs. I’ve done enough reporting on the AI data centers going up across central Utah to know what’s coming. These places drink water by the millions of gallons to keep their machines cool, and they’re being built in a state already locked in a years-long drought, with the Great Salt Lake shrinking and everyone downstream fighting over what’s left. The arguments over how much water a single one of my searches uses are messy and honestly hard to pin down. The buildout happening in our own backyard is not messy at all. It’s real, and it’s pulling from the same water this county depends on.
I’m not willing to build a publication meant to serve Sanpete on the back of something that strains the very place I’m trying to serve. Our Ethics page promised you, from the start, that we’d always be upfront about our tools and how we use them. This is me keeping that promise, even when the honest answer is an uncomfortable one.
So I’m stepping back instead of quietly carrying on. The site itself stays put. The Community Resource Directory and the Meeting Calendar are still here and still free, though I won’t be actively updating them during the pause, and every article already published stays online. The only thing stopping is new meeting coverage.
This is where you come in, because Sanpete Serves can come back the moment it no longer takes me and a machine to keep it alive. What it needs is local people willing to sit in these rooms and write down what happened, the old-fashioned way. You don’t need a journalism degree or fancy equipment. You just need to care about your town and be willing to show up for a council meeting now and then. If that’s you, even for one body close to home, email info@sanpeteserves.com. A handful of neighbors covering their own corners of the county could rebuild this into something better than I could ever do alone.
Thank you for reading, and for caring about this place enough to wonder where the articles went. I’d rather pause and get this right than keep going in a way I can’t stand behind.
Warmly and with resilience,
Mariah Tyler Moore, Sanpete Serves | Radical Resilience LLC
