{"id":371,"date":"2026-10-09T09:53:47","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T17:53:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rainier-it.com\/blog\/?p=371"},"modified":"2026-10-21T00:06:40","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T07:06:40","slug":"orting-news-self-hosted-local-news-pipeline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rainier-it.com\/blog\/orting-news-self-hosted-local-news-pipeline\/","title":{"rendered":"Orting News: How We Built a Self-Hosted Local News Feed (Polling, Whisper and a Human in the Loop)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The City Council met for almost four hours on a Wednesday night. They raised utility rates, allowed homes in downtown commercial buildings and approved a water-main deal with the state. The next morning, almost nobody in town knew.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Orting doesn’t have a newspaper. Like a lot of small towns, the news is all public, but it’s scattered: city notices in one place, the fire department’s posts in another, school board meetings on YouTube and four-hour council recordings that nobody has time to watch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So we added Orting News<\/strong> to Shop Orting<\/a>, our free community site: shoporting.org\/news<\/a>. It collects public records from the city, the county, the school district, the fire department and the Weather Service, and turns them into short stories in plain English. Every story links to its source. Council and school board meetings come with an AI summary and<\/em> the full transcript, so you can check the summary against what was actually said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This post is the tour: how the polling works, how a four-hour meeting becomes a readable story, the guardrails we put on the AI, and how we keep an eye on all of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
shoporting.org\/news. Every card is a public record turned into a short story, with its source on the card.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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\ud83e\udded The pipeline at a glance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The whole thing is a small Python worker plus a WordPress site. Once an hour, the worker checks each source, turns anything new into a story and saves it as a draft. A person reviews every draft from a Discord message before it goes live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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