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 item schema below. 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 (see Coarse Filter below).

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. Give the dispatched model: topic, verdict/code tables, asymmetry rule, and items' five facts plus a text excerpt.

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.

• 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. See Freshness Forensics below.

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 (see Artifact Schema below) 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):

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.

Evidence Contract

Every collected item carries five facts:

Confidence: high (all five extracted), medium (one derived or weak), low (published_at null or 2+ derived).

Item Schema

{
  "id": "string", "title": "string", "url": "string",
  "outlet": "string", "author": "string|null",
  "published_at": "ISO 8601|null", "confidence": "high|medium|low",
  "evidence_notes": "string", "verdict": "keep|monitor_only|reject",
  "reason_code": "string", "freshness": "fresh|stale|unclear|null",
  "first_public_estimate": "ISO 8601|null",
  "freshness_sources": "integer", "duplicates_of": "string id|null"
}

Artifact Schema

{
  "schema_version": "1.0", "topic": "string",
  "collected_at": "ISO 8601",
  "counts": {"collected":0,"keep":0,"monitor_only":0,"reject":0,"unclear_freshness":0,"duplicates_consolidated":0},
  "items": []
}

Conservation rule: collected == keep + monitor_only + reject.

Coarse Filter

Asymmetry rule: high-magnitude stories downgrade to monitor_only at most, never reject. A false keep is cheap; a silent drop is expensive.

Reason Codes

Freshness Forensics

First-public time vs page date

A syndicated repost or refreshed CMS page can carry today's date on old news. Establish first-public time from (in trust order):

1. Article metadata (article:published_time, JSON-LD datePublished) on the originating outlet's page.
2. Earliest published_at across collected items covering the same story.
3. In-text anchors ("announced Tuesday") tied to a known date.

Two independent sources or verdict unclear. Independent means separately reported -- two copies of the same wire story count as one.

Syndication detection

Signals of a repost: wire credit in byline, rel=canonical pointing elsewhere, body near-identical to an earlier item, aggregator framing ("read more at"), outlet with no original bylines across beats. A repost inherits the original's first-public time.

Canonical-coverage selection

When several items cover one story, deliver one canonical item, link the rest via duplicates_of. Pick canonical by: originating outlet > earliest published_at > most complete five-fact record.

Same-story vs new-development

Two+ "new development" answers = separate item.