Simon Galperin, a longtime journalist, sought to fill the gap left by the decline of local newspapers in Bloomfield, N.J., with the Bloomfield Information Project, which aggregates news and information from various sources using tools like Zapier, Mailparser.io, Google Sheets, and Digest by Zapier. Automation enabled him to streamline tasks such as curating information into a newsletter, parsing press releases, and publishing content to multiple platforms, allowing him to focus on more strategic projects. The project has shared almost 2,000 news items since March and has attracted 400 email subscribers, demonstrating the community's appetite for news in this "news desert." With Zapier, Galperin can now treat quality news as a public good, working towards his vision of news as a public utility.