Local News Matters MCP server

An MCP server that exposes the articles and photos of Local News Matters — the Bay City News Foundation's nonprofit local-news site — to MCP-aware clients such as Claude Desktop and Claude Code.

It is a thin, read-only wrapper over the site's public WordPress REST API (/wp-json/wp/v2/), normalizing the verbose WordPress JSON into compact, LLM-friendly objects.

What it provides

Tools (search / read the live catalog)

Tool	Description
search_articles	Full-text article search with paging + filters (category, tag, author, date range).
list_recent_articles	The latest published articles.
get_article	A single article by numeric ID, including full body text.
get_article_by_slug	A single article by its URL slug.
search_photos	Search the photo/media library (images only).
get_photo	A single photo's metadata + every available size.
get_article_photos	All photos attached to a given article.
list_categories	Site sections, ordered by article count.
list_tags	Topic tags (optionally filtered).
list_authors	Contributors / authors.

Resources (addressable by URI)

URI	Description
lnm://article/{id}	One article (full text) as JSON.
lnm://article/{id}/photos	Photos attached to an article.
lnm://photo/{id}	One photo's metadata and sizes.
lnm://recent/articles	The latest articles.
lnm://categories	The site's categories.

Because the archive holds thousands of items, the full catalog is reached through the search/list tools; resource templates address any individual item once you know its ID.

Install & run

Requires Python 3.10+.

# clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/rnakashima1/localnewsmatters-mcp.git
cd localnewsmatters-mcp

# run it (uv installs dependencies on first run)
uv run localnewsmatters-mcp
# or, once installed into an environment
pip install .
localnewsmatters-mcp

The server speaks MCP over stdio, which is what desktop clients expect.

Configure a client

Claude Code

claude mcp add localnewsmatters -- uv run --directory /absolute/path/to/clone/localnewsmatters-mcp localnewsmatters-mcp

Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "localnewsmatters": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": ["run", "--directory", "/absolute/path/to/clone/localnewsmatters-mcp", "localnewsmatters-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Configuration (environment variables)

Variable	Default	Purpose
LNM_BASE_URL	https://localnewsmatters.org	Site root; point at a staging mirror if needed.
LNM_USER_AGENT	localnewsmatters-mcp/0.1 …	Outbound User-Agent header.
LNM_TIMEOUT	30	Per-request timeout in seconds.

Development

uv sync          # install runtime + dev dependencies
uv run pytest    # run the test suite (fully offline; HTTP is mocked)

Notes & limitations

• This is an unofficial client and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Local News Matters / Bay City News Foundation. Please respect the site's terms of use and use the data responsibly, with attribution.
• The server depends on the WordPress REST API being publicly enabled at /wp-json/wp/v2/. If the site changes platforms or restricts the API, the endpoints in wp_client.py will need to be updated.
• All access is read-only.

License

MIT