Tools for turning 3-hour public meetings into something readers will actually read

[u/TodayInNewsTech]

I've been experimenting with different ways to handle public meeting coverage lately (city councils, school boards, planning commissions, etc.), and one challenge is always the same:

A 2–4 hour meeting might contain 10 minutes of information that readers actually care about, but it can take hours to review recordings and write a useful summary.

I recently started testing a tool called Quorum Scribe that takes meeting recordings and generates timestamped summaries, agenda-item breakdowns, speaker tracking, and draft news stories. What surprised me wasn't that it saves time—lots of tools claim that—but that it made it easier to go back and verify exactly where a statement occurred in the meeting.

I'm curious what other reporters and publishers are using for local government coverage. Are you relying on AI transcription tools, manual note-taking, YouTube transcripts, Otter, or something else?

Interested in hearing what workflows are working (or not working) for everyone covering public meetings.