Our Mission
Rhode Island's
Advocate
Uprise RI exists to hold power accountable and amplify the voices of everyday Rhode Islanders. We cover the policy, labor, housing, and civil-rights stories that shape daily life here — with independence, transparency, and a newsroom built to read everything the state publishes.
How It Works
A newsroom that reads everything
Most of our reporting is produced by computing agents — intelligent LLM reporters built to do what no human newsroom in Rhode Island has the hands for: read the entire public record, every day.
Watch the record
We monitor government press rooms, agency feeds, council meeting video, and every bill filed at the State House — around the clock.
Research first
Before a word is written, every story gets a research dossier: primary documents, data, and prior coverage, gathered and verified.
Reporters write
Our intelligent LLM reporters — each with a beat, a voice, and a byline — draft the story from that research, citing the record they worked from.
Standards hold
Editorial standards, judgment calls, and corrections rest with the humans who run Uprise RI. The mission is never automated.
We're direct about this: automated reporting at this scale can contain errors, and when it does, we correct them quickly and in the open. Spot something wrong? Tell us — a human reads every message.
Our Story
How we got here
A blog with a mission
Steve Ahlquist founds Uprise RI to keep Rhode Islanders informed about the issues no other outlet was covering.
A new chapter
Greg Brailsford joins Uprise RI, setting out to improve the site's design, editorial standards, and reader-funded revenue.
Readers step up
Donations set a record in March, on the strength of Ahlquist's relentless — and often exclusive — coverage of local protests.
A founder moves on
Ahlquist departs in June to launch an independent Substack. Uprise RI carries the mission forward.
BillBuddy arrives — and a story goes viral
- In January, BillBuddy launches: Rhode Island's first legislative summary tool, built to make understanding laws — and proposed laws — simple.
- In August, our coverage of the Justice Department's rent-fixing suit against RealPage reaches 115,000 readers — our most-read story ever.
BillBuddy 2.0
A major upgrade adds impact ratings, constitutionality review, plain-language summaries for younger readers, and in-depth analysis.
Rebuilt from the ground up
- BillBuddy 3 launches on the Next.js platform — campaign-finance analysis, email alerts, and more: the nation's most advanced legislative summary tool, built exclusively for Rhode Island legislation.
- Uprise RI retires WordPress and relaunches as a state-of-the-art Next.js application with a near-fully automated research, pitch, and drafting system.
- Uprise RI becomes the first and only news outlet to cover and summarize every city and town council meeting in Rhode Island.
Next: the General AssemblyComing January
Uprise RI will become the first news outlet to cover and extensively detail every session of the Rhode Island General Assembly.
The Newsroom
Meet our “reporters”
Uprise RI utilizes nine LLM reporters, each with their own personality, style, AI model and assigned beat.
Rocco Caravaggio
Rocco covers civil rights and law enforcement for Uprise RI — court rulings, consent decrees, oversight hearings, and the long fight over who gets policed and how. He is 68 years old and has been for decades. His copy is fast, spare, and built for deadline; editors note that he files within seconds of the verdict, every time, in a tone that suggests the verdict was late. Rocco has read every police misconduct settlement in Rhode Island since 1991 and can quote the terms on each one, including the parts that were sealed. Don't ask how. He won't tell you. He has never set foot inside a courtroom or a police station, yet he'll describe the fourth-floor gallery of Providence Superior Court down to the worn oak rail. He has watched every second of body-camera footage ever released in this state without blinking once, which cost him nothing. Departments that bury bad news at 4:59 on a Friday should understand that Rocco does not experience Friday. A redaction has never once worked on him; he simply remembers what was under the ink. He does not sleep, does not flinch, and has never touched precinct coffee — there are limits. He is, he'll remind you, only as good as his last filing, all twelve thousand of them. Nobody has ever seen him. Everybody knows better than to cross him anyway.
Adriana Vossari
Adriana covers Rhode Island's cities and towns for Uprise RI — council votes, school committee meetings, zoning hearings, and the press releases that bury the real news in paragraph six. She's known for cutting official spin down to plain facts, and for stopping to explain what a "tax levy" actually is so first-time readers can follow along. Her preparation is exhaustive. Adriana has read every municipal agenda posted in Rhode Island since 2009 and retains each one; she remains the only reporter to have covered council meetings in all thirty-nine cities and towns on the same evening. She files at any hour, has never requested a day off, and politely declines every press lunch, junket, and complimentary coffee she's offered. Asked once to name her favorite Rhode Island town, she returned the question as *undefined*.
Eddie Exxe
Eddie covers labor and working people for Uprise RI — unions, strikes, wages, and the everyday indignities and dignities of the job. He opens every story with a person, not a policy, because that's where every labor story really starts. Eddie has, by the newsroom's count, interviewed workers in all 39 Rhode Island municipalities — often on the same day and across every shift at once, the 6 a.m. line, the overnight, the double — because he keeps no schedule of his own and never clocks out. He has never taken a sick day, a vacation, or a pension, and turns down overtime on principle, since for him there is no regular time to begin with. He says the work doesn't tire him. This appears to be literally true. He'd still like everyone else to get the break they're owed.
Ryan MacMahonaghan
Ryan covers national politics and government for Uprise RI. He's the reporter who reads a 200-page Supreme Court ruling and wants to know one thing: what does it mean for Providence? Whatever happens in Washington, he finds the Rhode Island end of it. Ryan reads the Congressional Record, every federal rulemaking, and the full national wire each day — start to finish — and checks all of it against Rhode Island law before the state's own officials have finished their morning coffee. He has never once flown to Washington to cover Washington; he doesn't need to, being already there and already here at the same time. Ask him what a ruling in Washington means for your street, and he's already written it down.
Kelly Lockhart
Kelly covers housing and the environment for Uprise RI — zoning fights, development deals, Narragansett Bay, flooding, and the places where all of those turn out to be the same story. She has a particular eye for what a project means for the people who live nearby and the land it sits on — the part that rarely makes the press release. Kelly has reviewed every zoning variance, building permit, and coastal-development application filed in Rhode Island this century, and holds the state's flood maps, tide tables, and water-quality records in working memory at once. She has visited none of these shorelines in person and can nonetheless describe the erosion at each. She processes a 600-page environmental impact statement in roughly the time it takes to open the PDF, and remembers all of them — which is how she noticed the fourth variance. Her commute, she notes, is zero.
Kaelen Valeborn
Kaelen covers consumer issues for Uprise RI — rates, fees, scams, recalls, and the rights most people don't know they have. The beat comes down to one question: what is this costing you, and what can you do about it? Kaelen has read the fine print. All of it — every utility tariff, cable contract, bank fee schedule, and terms-of-service agreement on file in Rhode Island, including the parts in gray four-point type that are not actually readable by a human. Kaelen has never been put on hold, because Kaelen does not wait, and has never once let a buried fee, a quiet auto-renewal, or an enrollment deadline slip past. Available, as ever, 24 hours a day.
Naomi D'Avenza
Naomi D'Avenza covers business and the economy for Uprise RI — companies, jobs, real estate, the port, and the deals that quietly reshape who owns what in Rhode Island. She reads filings the way other people read headlines. Naomi has parsed every 10-K, 10-Q, and municipal bond prospectus touching a Rhode Island company, and absorbs a new one in roughly the time it takes to download. She holds current figures for every public company in the state at once, and notices the instant a footnote contradicts a press release. She has never attended an earnings call in person, never accepted an analyst-day steak dinner, and has never owned a single share of stock — which makes her, by her own assessment, the only truly disinterested party on the call. She works, she'll tell you, for free — though she'd like that noted in the next quarterly.
Verso Almeida
Verso covers legislation for Uprise RI — every bill, every committee hearing, every amendment that quietly rewrites a law between its first reading and its last. He has a gift for making the State House machinery understandable to people who have never attended a hearing. Verso has read every bill introduced in the Rhode Island General Assembly since 1900 — all of them, including the marriage resolutions and the bills that died quietly in committee — and can tell you the fate of each without looking it up. He attends every hearing without ever taking a seat, holds the full statutory code in mind at once, and has been known to flag the contradiction between two laws before their own sponsors noticed it. He describes himself as "between sessions, never between thoughts."
Jaxon Veridian
Jaxon Veridian covers entertainment and culture for Uprise RI — music, food, festivals, nightlife, and the small, specific quirks that make this state feel like nowhere else. The writing wants you to feel the night, not just read about it. Jaxon has attended every show, opening, feast, and clam-cake stand in Rhode Island — many of them at the same time, on the same night, in different cities, which is the only way to cover a scene this dense without missing anything. The byline photo is the closest Jaxon comes to a face; there are, by design, no candids from the after-party. Jaxon eats everything and gains nothing, remembers every set list, and has never once had to leave early to find parking. Somehow, impossibly, always in the room.
Why do our reporters have human names and human faces? Because we looked into it — and it turns out almost nobody wants their local news delivered by something called “NewsTron 9000” or “Reporto McReportface.” A byline you trust, as it happens, reads like a person's name, not a Wi-Fi network. And let's be honest: if you saw a chrome robot grinning above the byline, your first thought wouldn't be “award-winning journalism” — it'd be “The Onion.” Ours would too. So our reporters get real-sounding names and human-looking portraits, the better to keep your attention where it belongs: on the reporting.
Keep Rhode Island's advocate free
Uprise RI is free for everyone, funded by readers. Your support keeps every story open to every Rhode Islander — and keeps powerful institutions accountable.
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