/news-collection

name: news-collection
promoted_to: content
description: "Collect, filter, and freshness-qualify news items."
user-invocable: false
routing:
  triggers:
    - "news collection"
    - "collect news"
    - "qualify news items"
    - "news triage"
    - "filter news feed"
    - "check news freshness"
  not_for: "general research reports — that is research-pipeline. Pick this when the input is a stream of news items to qualify for a content pipeline."
  pairs_with:
    - research
  complexity: Medium
  category: research

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):

| 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.

---

Evidence Contract

Every collected item carries five facts:

| Fact | Type | Missing value handling | |------|------|------------------------| | `title` | string | Empty string only if page truly has none; note in `evidence_notes` | | `url` | string | Required -- no URL means unverifiable; exclude from artifact | | `outlet` | string | Derive from domain when no masthead found; note derivation | | `author` | string or null | `null` when no byline; note where you looked | | `published_at` | ISO 8601 or null | Extracted from metadata, never guessed. `null` when absent; lower `confide