Subscriptions & sources
JournoHelper monitors public government documents for the bodies you follow. Understanding jurisdictions vs. organizations helps you set up coverage without duplicate alerts or missed meetings.
Jurisdiction vs. organization
A jurisdiction is the geographic or administrative unit — Carroll County, Metro Nashville, the City of Westminster. Inside each jurisdiction live individual government bodies: the county commission, the school board, the planning commission, the mayor's office.
In JournoHelper, each body you follow is an organization (also called a source in the database). You subscribe to organizations, not whole states. That lets you follow the city council without also getting every obscure advisory board in the same county — unless you want to.
Following bodies on your beat
Open Sources and search by name, jurisdiction, or zip code. Use Add sources to pick the councils, commissions, and agencies you cover. When you follow a body, JournoHelper starts monitoring its public agendas, minutes, voting records, and press releases.
New subscriptions trigger a backfill of roughly the last 90 days of documents for that body, so you land with context instead of starting from zero. Following a body is free — it does not use AI credits.
Where: In the app: Sources → Add sources.
Subscriptions vs. alert cadence
Following a body and choosing how you are alerted are two separate settings. Following means we ingest documents and show them on your Documents page. Alert cadence controls whether and how often you hear about new items via email or Slack.
You can follow a body with alerts turned off — useful when you want the archive in JournoHelper but prefer to check Documents manually. Conversely, you need to follow a body before alerts can fire for its new documents.
Jurisdiction-wide vs. per-organization alerts
In Settings → Alert Subscriptions, jurisdictions are grouped with their organizations listed underneath. Set a cadence at the jurisdiction level (Instant, Daily digest, Weekly digest, or Off) and every organization in that group inherits it.
Override any single organization for a custom cadence — the UI marks it "(custom)" so you can see at a glance which bodies have their own schedule. Example: instant alerts for the city council, weekly digest for the parks board.
Where: In the app: Settings → Alert Subscriptions.
Managing and removing coverage
Return to Sources anytime to add more bodies or unsubscribe from ones you no longer cover. Unsubscribing stops new document ingestion for your account and removes that body from your alert routing. Documents already in your archive stay visible.
Teams share a pool of followed sources — when a colleague follows a body, it counts toward the team's coverage. Team admins manage who is on the roster; see the Team management guide for invites and roles.
Where: In the app: Sources. Team invites: Team.
Requesting a missing jurisdiction
If your area is not listed, use Contact or Support to tell us which county or city you need. We add jurisdictions based on reporter demand and verify scrapers before marking a area live. See the FAQ for more on coverage gaps.
Where: On the site: /contact or /support.