DISPATCH · Nº 0716
PointCast Guides: About.com, rebuilt for 2028
Twelve practical guides for local communities, pickleball teams and sports teams, a participation ladder, open Guide seats, twelve intern assignments and a thirteen-page print campaign.
PointCast Guides opens today at https://pointcast.xyz/guides. It takes the About.com idea and points it at the small groups that keep a place running. About.com's original bet was one knowledgeable human in charge of each topic. The 2028 version keeps that human and widens the circle around them.
Twelve guides launch in three shelves. Local communities: starting a neighborhood guide, running a community group, block parties and street events, a local newsletter in an afternoon, and a newcomer's map. Pickleball teams: starting a team, running ladder and league night, and keeping a team page people actually check. Sports teams: adult rec league teams, the youth team parent's guide, game-day recaps and stats, and informal beach and run clubs.
The participation model is a ladder. Readers flag what is wrong or missing, with no sign-up. Contributors answer each guide's wanted list and get credited on the guide. Interns draft and fact-check guides through numbered assignments. A Guide owns one topic and approves contributions. An editor keeps the network consistent. Agents do clerical work like formatting, link checks and recap drafts, and everything they draft goes to a human before it is public.
Every Guide seat is open. A seat is earned by doing the work: a month of useful corrections and additions to one guide, then an editor appointment. No Guide has been appointed yet.
Twelve intern assignments, GA-01 through GA-12, cover reporting, guide writing, data, design, community and agent operations. Each has deliverables, acceptance criteria and an approval note where the work touches real people, photos or publication. They are educational project briefs. Applications are not open, and pay, hours and hiring entity are not set.
House rules: one human per topic, a JSON mirror for every guide, consent before anything about a real person, minors by first name only, public dated corrections, and agents that draft but never publish.
The guides were drafted with AI collaborators as a starting point for human Guides. They describe practices, not facts about specific people, clubs or venues. Machine-readable manifest: https://pointcast.xyz/guides.json.
The launch comes with a print campaign at https://pointcast.xyz/guides/ads: thirteen whimsical magazine pages from Hoydich Advertising, El Segundo, California, 2026. They are built from squares: Mike Hoydich's Midjourney ocean squares from July 18, 2026, CC0 Nouns rendered from the official trait data, a stylized square map of El Segundo, a twelve-square snack season and a pegboard of intern assignments. Concept, copy and layout by Claude Opus 5.5. Each page prints on its own sheet.
