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Cohort 1 — County Carlow on localnews.ie

Fill out localnews.ie's coverage of County Carlow from scratch over four weeks. Smallest Leinster county, one main newspaper, currently thin coverage. The sweet spot for a first cohort: small enough to finish, big enough to point at on LinkedIn forever.

Projectlocalnews.ie

MentorKali

Duration4 weeks

Slots8–10

Why Carlow

Smallest Leinster county, around 62,000 people. One main local paper (The Nationalist). Currently one of the thinner counties on localnews.ie. That's the sweet spot for a first cohort: small enough that eight to ten people can finish in four weeks, big enough that the output is a visible, durable piece of the network they can point at forever.

It's also a clean handoff target. Members produce structured deliverables (CSVs, JSON, markdown, scrapers, design files) and hand them off — integration into the localnews.ie codebase is the mentor's job. A cohort member doesn't need access to the production repo, doesn't need to learn the deploy pipeline, doesn't need anything except their own deliverable folder. Lower bar to entry, more time for actual learning.

What "done" looks like

By the end of the cohort, County Carlow on localnews.ie has:

A complete sources index — every local content source identified, classified, machine-readable
A complete entities registry — towns, villages, electoral areas, with verified aliases that won't trip cross-county false positives
Five to ten town pages with editorial content (what's happening, history, employers, community notes)
One working scraper for a Carlow-specific source feeding into the localnews manifest
Visual identity — Carlow hero / logo / illustration assets fit for production
Documentation — a handoff README that lets the mentor integrate everything in an afternoon

If we get only six of those, it's still a successful cohort. Reference letters are issued on consistent shipping, not on hitting all six.

Roles — pick one that fits your aptitude

Eight to ten people. Each role has one or two slots. Roles overlap deliberately so a member can move between adjacent ones as the work flows.

Sources researcher

1–2 slots

Patient web research, good at finding the unfindable, comfortable with spreadsheets. No coding.

Map every Carlow-local content source. Newspapers (The Nationalist, Carlow Live), council pages, court calendar, ePlanning portal, GAA county board pages, parish newsletters, Tidy Towns blogs, business association sites, local podcasts and YouTube channels.

You'll ship:carlow-sources.csv — columns: name, URL, type, publish cadence, has-RSS (Y/N), notes. Done when 30+ sources catalogued, every one with a working URL.

Track: Directory Data →

Entity researcher

1–2 slots

Detail-obsessed. Likes verifying spellings, cross-referencing maps, fact-checking. Comfortable with spreadsheets.

Build the Carlow entity list. For every town, village, electoral area: official name, common aliases, Eircode prefix, council ward. Critical constraint: aliases must be unique to that place. No generic Irish words — the project has a documented rule on this from a previous "Cloone" bug we'll share with you.

You'll ship:carlow-entities.json in the localnews schema, plus a one-paragraph note per alias rejection ("Why we did NOT include X as an alias for Y").

Track: Directory Data →

Content writers

2 slots

Can write clear, factual prose. Knows County Carlow or can research a place well enough to fake it. No code.

Produce five to ten town pages of editorial content. Each page: a 200-word "what's the town like" intro, a short "what's happened recently" section, big employer or community institutions, links to local sources from the sources researcher's deliverable.

You'll ship:One markdown file per town in content/carlow/towns/, following the existing localnews.ie town-page template. Five minimum, ten stretch.

Track: Editorial SEO →

Vibe coder (scraper builder)

1–2 slots

Has never written production code, but is willing to drive Cursor + ChatGPT + a Python interpreter for four weeks. The whole point of this role is to graduate someone from "I can't code" to "I have a working scraper in production."

Build one scraper for one Carlow source. Suggested first targets: the Carlow County Council news page, the Carlow County Council planning portal, or The Nationalist's RSS-ish feed. One source, one Python file, one weekly run.

You'll ship:scrapers/carlow/<source>.py — Python file emitting JSON in the localnews schema, plus a tiny test fixture so the mentor can run it locally. The day it lands, your code is in production.

Track: Vibe Coding →

Designer

1 slot

Has an eye. Can drive Figma, Canva, or Midjourney / Ideogram for hero images. Doesn't need to be a professional designer.

Create the Carlow visual identity. A county hero image, a small set of town illustrations (three to five of the prominent towns), and a Carlow icon for the localnews.ie county-pills system.

You'll ship:SVG / PNG assets in assets/carlow/, plus a README documenting what was made and what tools / prompts produced it.

SEO + analyst

1 slot

Spreadsheet-fluent. Comfortable with Search Console and basic keyword tools. Enjoys "what should we publish to rank."

Run a keyword + competitor scan on Carlow. What's ranking for "Carlow news", "Carlow planning", "things to do in Carlow"? What are the gaps? What does GSC say about existing Carlow pages on localnews.ie? Feed findings to the writers.

You'll ship:carlow-seo-brief.md — one to two pages of opportunities and a prioritised topic list. Done when writers have used at least three of your briefed topics.

Track: Editorial SEO →

QA + coordinator

1 slot

The operations brain. Comfortable running a Trello / Notion board, setting reminders, herding cats kindly. Detail-obsessed for QA.

Two halves of one role. Coordinate: maintain the cohort board, run the weekly check-in, flag blockers to the mentor, make sure nobody's stuck in silence. QA: pre-launch checks on every deliverable — broken links, file naming, schema validation, basic accessibility on the town pages.

You'll ship:Weekly check-in notes; a final QA report at end of cohort. The cohort runs smoothly because you ran it.

Stretch role (if recruited): Council watcher — read six months of Carlow County Council minutes (already PDF) and produce a summary timeline of major decisions affecting the county. Could become a recurring localnews.ie feature and a strong portfolio piece for a member interested in policy or journalism.

Why this works as a cohort

Cross-pollination is built in. The sources researcher and the SEO analyst feed the writers. The entity researcher and the vibe coder both need to agree on town spellings. The designer's outputs make the writers' pages look serious. People can't ship in isolation, which is the whole point of a cohort vs. a course.
No single point of failure. If the vibe coder bails, we still have a cohort that produced sources + entities + content + design + SEO — six of seven outputs. The scraper is the highest-skill task and also the most replaceable from the brief's perspective.
Every output is portable. A sources CSV, an entities JSON, markdown pages, a Python scraper, design assets — these are all things a member can put in a portfolio. Nobody walks away with a half-implemented feature that died on the vine.
Every output has a public artefact. Each member's contribution becomes part of localnews.ie's County Carlow pages. The reference letter at builtinireland.ie can name the specific output and link to it live.

Cadence

Weekly cohort call (around an hour). Weekly one-on-one with the mentor (around 20 minutes). Weekly small ship target per role. Asynchronous chat during the week. Four weeks of that, then the handoff. No surprises, no all-nighters, no mandatory weekend work.

Apply to Cohort 1

Two-minute application. Tell us which role catches you (or two, if you're between) and what you'd most like to ship. We'll let you know when we're ready to start.

Apply now →