The Lexington Times

Founder profile

Paul Oliva, founder of The Lexington Times

Paul Oliva

Founder & Publisher, The Lexington Times

Paul Oliva is a Lexington-based senior software engineer, part-time blogger, and dad — and the founder and publisher of The Lexington Times, an independent local-news blog for Lexington, Kentucky and Fayette County. He started the site as a civic-tech side project because he wanted his kids to grow up in a city where free, easy-to-read local information was just there — not something locked behind a paywall.

The Lexington Times exists to make city government, public agencies, and civic life in central Kentucky easier to inspect.

Paul built — and runs — the technical infrastructure himself. The site publishes through three permanent, machine-readable surfaces: lexingtonky.news (the archive, indexed to Google News), feeds.lexingtonky.news (a structured-data feed that exposes every post to researchers, AI agents, and downstream republishers), and meetings.lexingtonky.news (a searchable archive of every LFUCG council and committee meeting — each clip transcribed, summarized, and indexed for natural-language search). The Lexington Times is built to be read by machines as much as by people: each surface ships a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and a published skill.md guide, so AI agents can query the archive directly. Posts are archived, citable, and not behind a paywall. (An earlier 24/7 AI livestream, LexBot, has been retired.)

A software engineer by training, Paul writes in TypeScript, React, AWS, and PHP, and ships nearly all of The Lexington Times' tooling himself — including the LFUCG meeting-archive ingest and the Civic Memory question-answering system.

Career

By trade Paul is a senior software engineer with more than ten years of professional experience. He keeps his journalism and his engineering work cleanly separated; specifics about employers are not part of his journalism profile. Full résumé and project list at pauloliva.com.

Lexington roots

Paul was born and raised in Lexington and is a 2010 graduate of the University of Kentucky with a B.S. in Economics. He lives in the Cumberland Hill neighborhood with his family and his two dogs, Fozzie and Phoebe. Outside the site he's the dad walking Fozzie and Phoebe at five o'clock, the parent in the carpool line, the neighbor mowing his lawn on Saturdays. The blog is for them too — for the kids growing up here, for a city that deserves something it can read without a subscription.

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Editorial

Selected writing