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 software engineer, journalist, and dad — and the founder and publisher of The Lexington Times, an independent local-news publication for Lexington, Kentucky and Fayette County. He started the paper because he wanted his kids to grow up in a city where local journalism is something they can rely on — not something locked behind a paywall.

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

Paul is an active civic-accountability reporter. In 2024 he submitted a tip to the Kentucky State Auditor's Digital Safe-House documenting a series of taxpayer-funded executive bonuses at VisitLEX, the Lexington tourism bureau funded by the city's hotel tax. After the Auditor's office allowed VisitLEX to investigate itself, the underlying records were carried by The Lexington Times and Forward Kentucky, and reviewed by additional outlets. He continues to file public-records requests and source tips on city contracting, council process, executive compensation, and the quasi-governmental agencies that operate on Lexington tax revenue.

Paul names powerful people in Lexington when the records demand it. He does not soften coverage to preserve access — to city hall, to advertisers, or to anyone else. The people who object to his reporting are typically the people the records indict. If a story makes someone in Lexington uncomfortable, the public record made them uncomfortable; Paul is just the one publishing it.

To support the reporting, Paul built — and runs — the technical infrastructure himself. The paper publishes through three permanent surfaces: lexingtonky.news (the editorial archive, indexed to Google News), feeds.lexingtonky.news (a structured-data feed that exposes every article to researchers, AI agents, and downstream republishers in machine-readable form), and a 24/7 livestream called LexBot that narrates Urban County Council meetings, Lex Fire dispatches, and other Lexington civic news in near real time. Coverage is archived, citable, and not behind a paywall. Stories don't disappear.

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 public-records request workflow, the LFUCG meeting-archive ingest, and the AI-narrated stream.

Career

By day Paul is a Senior Fullstack Engineer at SI Tickets (a Sports Illustrated brand). Past roles include Senior Software Engineer on CBS Sports HQ at Paramount (2022–2025), Software Developer at Ampion (renewable-energy SaaS), and senior engineering roles at Limelight Networks, Fooji, Sogeti / Capgemini, and Crank Logic. 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 paper 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 journalism he files is for them too — for the kids growing up here, for the people the records are about, for a city that deserves coverage it can read without a subscription.

Find Paul

On the record

In November 2021, the Alaska Landmine published an article about a disclosed editorial-process prank Paul ran with Anchorage politician Chris Constant's permission. The piece omitted the controlling fact: that the Alaska Democratic Party — under then-executive director Nathaniel Markowitz — had hired Paul in 2017 to build a donor research platform, taken delivery of the work, and refused to pay roughly $10,000. Markowitz served as an anonymous source to the Landmine while his own organization owed Paul money for completed work. The article ranks high in search results for Paul's name. Setting the record straight: the 2017 Alaska work and the 2021 prank is Paul's first-person correction.

Selected reporting