Impact & Coverage

Source Selection

ETTG indexes RSS feeds from local news outlets across all 50 states. Sources are added through a combination of manual curation, automated discovery (scanning public directories and Wikipedia lists of local outlets by state), and community submissions. Every source is reviewed before being made active.

We do not accept payment for source inclusion. Inclusion decisions are based solely on editorial relevance to a geographic community.

Geographic Attribution

Each article is attributed to geographic locations through a multi-stage pipeline:

1. Primary attribution: the source's home location (e.g., a county newspaper is attributed to that county)
2. NLP extraction: the article title and summary are analyzed to identify other locations mentioned, using a named-entity recognition pipeline
3. Location index: every article-to-location link is stored in a dedicated index, enabling any county or city page to surface relevant stories without fetching the full article

The result: a single article can appear on the feeds of multiple states, counties, and cities it is genuinely relevant to - not based on keyword matching, but on geographic entity recognition.

What We Don't Do

• We do not write or edit content - all articles link back to their original publisher
• We do not rank sources by political leaning or editorial perspective
• We do not use behavioral tracking, cookies, or user profiling
• We do not accept money from sources in exchange for preferred placement
• We do not store article full text; we store only title, summary, and metadata

Limitations

ETTG indexes sources with publicly accessible RSS feeds. Sources behind paywalls, outlets that haven't published a feed, and sources not yet discovered are not included. The index grows continuously as new sources are submitted and verified.

Geographic attribution is handled through NLP and is probabilistic by nature. Confidence thresholds filter out low-confidence assignments, which means some articles may not be attributed even when a geographic connection exists.

The 1,585 counties without an indexed local source represent where the work continues. Some are genuine news deserts, others have sources we simply haven't found or added yet. ETTG is still growing, and we surface these gaps openly as a reminder of what's left to do.