News collection

News Collection

Gather news items on a topic, filter junk cheaply, verify freshness, and emit qualified items under an evidence contract. Pipeline-shaped: four phases, a gate between each. Content pipelines consume the JSON artifact; pair with fact-check to verify what this skill qualifies.

Instructions

Phase 1: COLLECT

Goal: gather candidate items from available sources (feeds, search results, provided fixtures). Every item carries the five-fact evidence contract: title, url, outlet, author, published_at.

Rule (verbatim from the design): publish times are extracted (article metadata), never guessed; missing timestamp → recorded as unknown, confidence lowered and disclosed. A guessed timestamp poisons every downstream freshness verdict; an honest "published_at": null keeps the item usable with known uncertainty.

Record each item as one JSON object per the schema in references/evidence-contract.md. Fill evidence_notes with where each fact came from (meta tag, byline, JSON-LD, sitemap).

Distinguish outcomes: zero items because sources were unreachable is a collection failure (report it, stop); zero items from reachable sources is a valid empty feed (deliver an empty artifact with counts of zero).

Gate: every collected item has all five fields present — value or explicit null with a confidence downgrade and a disclosure note. Items with silent gaps stay in COLLECT until the gap is recorded.

Phase 2: COARSE FILTER

Goal: cheap, high-recall pass over collected items. Three verdicts: keep / monitor_only / reject, each with a reason code from references/coarse-filter.md.

Rule (verbatim from the design): high-magnitude stories are downgraded to monitor_only at most, never rejected — a false keep is cheap, a silent drop is expensive. A keep costs one extra freshness check; a wrongly dropped major story costs the whole pipeline its value.

This phase runs on a cheap model when dispatched — it needs recall, not judgment depth. See the dispatch note in references/coarse-filter.md.

Gate: every item has exactly one verdict and one reason code. reject verdicts on items that look high-magnitude get re-checked once before the phase closes.

Phase 3: FRESHNESS CHECK

Goal: for each keep and monitor_only item, establish when the story first became public and whether this page is the original coverage. Methods in references/freshness-forensics.md:

• First-public time vs page date — a page can carry today's date on old news.
• Syndication and aggregator reposts detected; select the canonical coverage.
• Same-story vs new-development rubric — consolidate duplicates, keep genuine developments.

Rule (verbatim from the design): two independent sources or verdict "unclear". Conservative default: unclear over guessed. An "unclear" verdict is recoverable downstream; a confidently wrong "fresh" verdict ships stale news.

Gate: every surviving item carries freshness: fresh | stale | unclear, a first_public_estimate (or null), and the count of sources backing the verdict. Duplicate clusters are consolidated to one canonical item with duplicates_of links.

Phase 4: DELIVER

Goal: emit qualified items as a structured JSON artifact (schema: references/evidence-contract.md) plus a summary table. Every verdict state appears in the artifact — monitor_only, unclear, and reject items ship with their verdicts rather than vanishing, so consumers see the full triage.

Gate (deterministic phase checkpoint — emit this table before delivering the artifact; delivery without it is incomplete):

Verdict	Count
keep	n
monitor_only	n
reject	n
unclear (freshness)	n
duplicates consolidated	n

The counts make silent drops visible: collected total must equal keep + monitor_only + reject. If it does not, return to the phase that lost items.

Error Handling

No items collected

• Cause: sources unreachable, or feed genuinely empty.
• Solution: unreachable sources → report collection failure and stop; reachable but empty → deliver an empty artifact with zero counts. The two outcomes stay distinct so an outage is not read as a quiet news day.

No timestamp found anywhere for an item

• Cause: page has no metadata, byline date, or sitemap entry.
• Solution: set published_at: null, confidence: low, disclose in evidence_notes; freshness verdict for that item is unclear.

Two sources disagree on first-public time

• Cause: syndication chain or republished update.
• Solution: apply canonical-coverage selection (references/freshness-forensics.md); if still split, verdict unclear.

Item count mismatch at DELIVER

• Cause: an item was dropped without a verdict.
• Solution: diff item ids against the COLLECT record; assign the missing item a verdict with reason code.

Reference Loading Table

Signal	Load These Files	Why
Recording items, JSON artifact schema, confidence fields	evidence-contract.md	Five-fact contract and artifact schema
Assigning verdicts, reason codes, cheap-model dispatch	coarse-filter.md	Verdict definitions and dispatch note
Dating a story, syndication, duplicates, canonical pick	freshness-forensics.md	Forensic methods and rubrics