How it works — States News Service
How it works

Four steps, from official source to clean feed.

We prefer official feeds and sitemaps over aggressive scraping, so the data stays legitimate, low-risk and reliable — and higher quality, because it comes from the source's own structured output.

01

Discover

We build and maintain a master registry of official sources — starting from curated lists of roughly 2,500 government and public-interest sites, cleaned, deduplicated and normalized into one reliable list with a stable schema: source type, jurisdiction, homepage, press room, feed and sitemap URLs.

02

Monitor

Where a structured feed exists, we use it. We prefer official RSS, XML and Atom feeds, sitemaps and press-room indexes — collecting on polite, capped schedules that respect how publishers publish. High-value sources are captured across every stream, not pointed at a single news page.

03

Structure

Every document is normalized into one consistent NewsML-style schema and exported as clean XML or CSV — sourced, timestamped, with clean dates and body text. Indexes, navigation and boilerplate are filtered out. The relevance review is the product, not overhead.

04

Review & deliver

We work in small batches with logs, checkpoints and manual review, keeping raw, working and final data separate. Before any client delivery, a hard QA gate blocks five defect classes — non-articles, boilerplate, duplicates, encoding errors and wrong dates — so nothing ships unchecked.

Why feeds over scraping

Legitimate by design, not by exception.

Aggressive HTML scraping breaks constantly and strains publishers. By prioritizing official feeds, sitemaps and public indexes, we stay legitimate, low-risk and reliable — and data quality is higher because it comes from the source's own structured output.

Original source only
the governing body's own release, unaltered.
Comprehensive within scope
every stream a covered source puts out.
Always current
rosters auto-refresh; gaps trigger alerts.

Why not just build it yourself?

In-house monitoring looks simple until you run it. Here's what you'd own — and what we handle instead.

Build it in-house
×Crawlers break every time a site changes its markup.
×Official sources block automated access.
×Every source is a different format — nothing lines up.
×No relevance review: indexes, nav and boilerplate pollute the data.
×Rosters go stale after every election and appointment.
×You own the maintenance — forever.
With States News Service
Official feeds and sitemaps first — stable and permissioned.
One clean schema across every source.
Human relevance review keeps only real articles.
Rosters auto-refresh; gaps trigger alerts.
A zero-error gate blocks defects before delivery.
We run the pipeline — you just ingest.
The output

One clean record, every source.

Every document arrives normalized to the same schema — headline, dateline, date, source, language and full body — as NewsML-style XML, CSV or JSON. No messy HTML to parse; ready to ingest on day one.

{{ sample }}
The zero-error delivery gate

Every push must pass the gate before it reaches a client.

Non-article

indexes & nav blocked

Boilerplate

templated cruft removed

Duplicates

near-dupes filtered

Encoding

zero mojibake, clean round-trip

Wrong date

future/invalid dates caught

Delivery is over SFTP (or FTPS, S3, webhook), idempotent and atomic, with per-client formats and source filters. The gate is proven to block a deliberately-defective sample — not just to pass clean files — before any live credential is ever connected.

See what clean, structured data looks like.

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