Briefer News

The thesis: most of what newspapers cover starts as government output — press releases, court filings, regulatory rules, foreign-ministry statements, central-bank speeches. Those documents are public and free; the framing and editorial selection is what news outlets add on top — and where opinion enters. Briefer News reverses the priority: go straight to the government's own output, do the synthesis in-house, and skip the wire-syndication and commentary layers entirely. The brief is composed; it is not curated headlines.

Two editions publish daily, both built on the same scaffolding:

• U.S. edition at briefer.news/usa/ — 49 active U.S.-government sources including State Department, White House, Pentagon (via Akamai bypass for DoD .mil), Federal Reserve, Treasury, DOJ, CISA, the Federal Register, and GAO. Allied-government context (UK MoD, NATO, Australia DFAT, Japan MoFA) sits in a separate "Allied Governments" block — never blended into the U.S.-government Events list.
• China edition at briefer.news/china/ — 33 Chinese-government sources including MFA, State Council, NDRC, PBOC, MIIT, CAC, Qiushi (Party theoretical journal), CCDI, NPC, the Supreme People's Court, MND and 81.cn (PLA), plus People's Daily and Xinhua. Outside-the-gate context from non-PRC press sits in its own dedicated block, never substituted for primary PRC voice.

Each brief follows the same shape: a one-line headline; a dek (the day's narrative shape in 30–55 words, anchored to a cited primary-source item); a thread strip of active long-running arcs; the top 3 events of the day always visible; 6 more events behind a "Show 6 more" toggle; 6 verbatim voice quotes from named officials and documents (3 visible + 3 in a drop-down); a "This week" synopsis with a link to the full weekly digest; and a numbered Sources bibliography. The China edition also publishes a Strategic Backdrop tying daily items to long-arc doctrines (15th Five-Year Plan, new quality productive forces, common prosperity, and others).

Editorial principles

• Government sources only. Every cite on every page points to a .gov, .mil, or equivalent government URL. No syndicated journalism, no analyst commentary, no aggregator chrome.
• Everything is cited. Each bullet, each voice, each backdrop card carries a numeric or lettered cite that resolves to the underlying official document. The Sources block is the spine — the brief above it is a navigable summary of what's below.
• News without opinion. The dek synthesizes the day's significant events — what happened, not what someone thinks about what happened. Every assertion in the dek is anchored to an item in the Events list. The brief carries no editorial column, no analyst sidebar, no recommended action.
• Verbatim voices. Quotes are pulled directly from official transcripts and readouts — never paraphrased and never generated. The China brief carries a diplomatic-vocabulary calibration table so escalation and de-escalation language translates with its proper gradation.
• Continuity over churn. Long-arc threads (Iran war, summit cycles, multi-year wars) carry a Day-N counter to anchor returning readers in the arc.
• No paywalls, no ads, no tracking. The site is a static asset; the brand promise is the trust posture, not engagement metrics.

What this is not

• Not a wire. Reuters, AP, AFP, and Bloomberg are not part of the inputs. Briefer News reads what the government published, not what a wire reporter wrote about it.
• Not a newsletter or column. No editor's note, no analysis subscription, no opinion column.
• Not an aggregator. RSS reposting and link-roll compilation are different products. The brief is composed from primary sources, not curated headlines.
• Not social-media derivative. Inputs are first-party government publications — never tweets, never Reddit, never news-site comment sections, never other secondary commentary.

How it's made

The full pipeline runs autonomously on a Mac mini on a residential ISP — required because Akamai bot-detection on DoD .mil subdomains blocks cloud datacenter IPs. Scrapers fire at 04:00 PDT; synthesizers fire at 07:00 (U.S.) and 07:30 (China); a weekly digest refresh fires at 08:00 PDT. Output publishes to AWS S3 + CloudFront. A daily healthcheck runs at 09:30 PDT and notifies on failure. Per-edition RSS feeds publish at /usa/feed.xml and /china/feed.xml. The full implementation — scrapers, synth prompts, editorial style guides, deployment scripts — is open-source.

Repo

↗ github.com/ghanzo/briefer.news

Status

Live and operating since 2026-05-10. Multi-edition split (U.S. + China) landed 2026-05-12. Continuity strip, weekly digest, and the dek-voice spec landed 2026-05-14. Allied Governments and Outside the Gate blocks separated allied/non-PRC context from primary-government voice 2026-05-14. RSS feeds, sitemap, healthcheck, and Google Search Console verification went live 2026-05-22. Page layout reorganized for top-3-events-first with the trust-signal masthead tagline 2026-05-22. The brief evolves; see the GitHub commit log for the editorial and infrastructural history.