What this is
Briefer News is a daily intelligence brief on multi-government primary-source output. Every morning, the pipeline scrapes ~72 sources of official government publication across two editions, then a synthesizer curates and writes a published brief.
The thesis is simple: most of what newspapers cover starts as primary-source government output — press releases, court rulings, regulatory filings, foreign-ministry statements, central-bank speeches. Those primary sources are public and free. The aggregation, framing, and editorial selection is what newspapers add. Briefer News reverses the priority — go straight to the primary sources, do the framing in-house, and skip the syndication layer.
Two editions publish daily, with the same scaffolding:
- U.S. edition at briefer.news/usa/ — 45 active sources including State Department, White House, Pentagon (via Akamai-bypass), Federal Reserve, Treasury, DOJ, CISA, the Federal Register, GAO, UK MoD.
- China edition at briefer.news/china/ — 27 Chinese-government sources including MFA, State Council, NDRC, PBOC, MIIT, CAC, Qiushi (Party theoretical journal), CCDI, NPC, Supreme Court, plus People's Daily and Xinhua.
Each brief is 9 bullets, 6 voices, a Day's Narrative dek, a continuity strip of long-arc threads, and a Sources block. The China edition adds a Strategic Backdrop tying daily items to long-arc doctrines (15th Five-Year Plan, new quality productive forces, common prosperity, etc.). A weekly digest synthesizes the past 7 days at /usa/weekly/ and /china/weekly/.
Editorial principles
- Primary sources only. Every cite on every page points to a .gov, .mil, or equivalent primary-source URL. No syndicated journalism, no analyst commentary, no aggregator chrome.
- Verbatim voices. Quotes are pulled directly from official transcripts and readouts. The China brief includes a diplomatic-vocabulary calibration table so escalation/de-escalation language translates with its proper gradation.
- Stance over scope. The dek is the one line the brief is willing to be wrong about — an editorial read of what the day means, not a recap.
- 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.
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. The output is published to AWS S3 + CloudFront. Logs, configs, and scripts are open-source.
Repo
The full implementation — scrapers, synth prompts, editorial style guides, deployment scripts — lives on GitHub:
↗ github.com/ghanzo/briefer.news
Status
Live and operating since 2026-05-10. Daily briefs published since the multi-edition split on 2026-05-12. Continuity strip, weekly digest, and the dek-voice spec landed 2026-05-14. The brief evolves; see the GitHub commit log for the editorial and infrastructural history.