The news ledger is a neutral, automatically-assembled feed of public current-events and official-record signals. Nobody hand-writes the rows. This note explains what's actually behind it.
The live sources
The ledger now pulls from a broader set of public readers, with credentialless official feeds prioritized first:
- GDELT — a global index of news articles. Hugin queries it for a small set of accountability and civic-context topics, then treats that coverage as a coverage index, not as ground truth.
- The Federal Register API — official U.S. government records: notices, proposed rules, orders, comment windows, and agency information collections.
- Public safety readers — NWS active alerts, CDC newsroom rows, FEMA disaster declarations, USGS significant earthquakes, CPSC recalls, CISA known-exploited vulnerabilities, and openFDA food/drug/device enforcement rows.
- Consumer and market readers — CFPB newsroom, FTC consumer protection releases, and SEC press releases.
- Economic readers — BLS latest economic indicators, BEA economic releases, EIA Today in Energy, and Federal Reserve press releases.
- Justice and case-file readers — DOJ news releases plus the public-record source atlas used by Hugin's civic case files.
Results are clustered, scored for source diversity, and checked for official/API context. A news card can show both article coverage and nearby public-record rows, but every official row keeps a caveat beside it: the source anchors public context; it does not prove motive, blame, policy impact, or wrongdoing on its own.
The wider civic source atlas also tracks additional connector lanes, including
SEC company facts, CourtListener, OpenFEC, congressional records, state data
portals, and case-file repositories. Those stay visible as source
infrastructure even when they are not used as the lightweight /news card
reader.
Why it sometimes looks empty
The ledger reflects what the sources return right now. If GDELT has few matches for a topic, an agency feed is slow, or the page is serving a cached source window while the public readers refresh, you'll see that status directly. GDELT rate limits are treated as a source warning, not a feed failure: Hugin keeps serving RSS coverage plus official/API rows while that public index cools down. The source rail uses labels like live, bounded live, fallback live, or waiting so the reader can tell whether the feed is fresh, cached, partially degraded, or waiting on a reader.
What's next
The next useful work is not just adding more feeds. It is making every feed more auditable: public JSON, RSS, source registry rows, validation reports, hashes, and enough caveat text that a reader can see what Hugin did not conclude.
Some connectors still need credentials or operator review before they can be treated as live public readers. CourtListener, OpenFEC, congressional records, state data portals, and more case-file repositories stay visible in the source registry even when they are not allowed to drive a public row yet.
This journal is the authored counterpart to that automated feed: notes, method, and analysis written by a person, kept separate from the machine ledger.