About the site
Local news and historical coverage for every US county.
NewsByCounty is independently published data journalism. We aggregate current local news headlines and surface historical newspaper mentions from the Library of Congress for every one of America's 3,144 counties — in one place, for free.
What NewsByCounty Is
NewsByCounty is a news-aggregation and data-journalism site, not a primary news publisher. Our purpose is to collect and organize local news coverage about every US county from multiple sources — current headlines via the GNews API and historical mentions via the Library of Congress Chronicling America archive — so that anyone can understand what is happening in a place without visiting dozens of local news sites.
Every page on the site is built from primary-source data: live news headlines, Census Bureau demographic data, and historical newspaper records. Each source is attributed on the page, and the underlying methodology is published on the methodology page.
Who Runs NewsByCounty
NewsByCounty is published and edited by Evan Brooks, Data Editor of the ByCounty Network. The site uses automated pipelines to the automated pipeline that ingests public datasets from the U.S. Census Bureau, GNews API, and Library of Congress, then transforms them into plain-language reporting that anyone can use.
The data editor documents the methodology for composite scores and rankings across all 13 sites in the network, spot-checks AI-generated narratives for accuracy, and signs off on every published page. The data editor is the named editorial owner of this site: published information either matches the source data or it is corrected.
The data editor is not a professional journalist, and NewsByCounty does not present itself as a primary newsroom. We do not conduct original reporting, issue editorial endorsements, or publish opinion columns. Our role is the data-editor role — verify the aggregation, respect source attribution, and decline to publish anything that strays beyond what the source data supports.
Long-form features and reported pieces, when published, carry a visible byline and — for topics that benefit from subject-matter expertise — a named reviewer credit at the top of the article.
Why I Built NewsByCounty
I started NewsByCounty because local journalism is fragmented, and I wanted a single place to understand what was happening in any U.S. county. When you move, invest, or research a community, you often need to visit a dozen local news sites — each with its own paywall, search interface, and archive depth. I wanted a site where a regular person could see, in 30 seconds, the latest headlines and historical context for any county — with the sources right there on the page. No paywall, no gatekeeping, just public data and news aggregated honestly.
That same need shows up in every vertical we cover: property taxes, cost of living, crime, schools, environmental risk. The government already collects this data. Our job is to clean it, verify it, and make it comparable.
How We Decide What to Publish
Two documents govern this site's editorial decisions:
- Editorial Standards — our mission, source policy, AI-usage policy, corrections process, funding disclosure, and update cadence.
- Methodology — the exact data sources, aggregation process, limitations, and update cadence behind every page.
Both documents carry a "Last reviewed" date and are regenerated when our methodology changes.
Our Relationship to the Data
NewsByCounty is independent. We are not affiliated with the GNews API, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Census Bureau, or any government agency. We use their public datasets and APIs under the terms they publish. Each county page credits the data source that drives it.
When we link out — for example, to a local newspaper article or to a government data portal — we link to primary sources, not aggregators.
AI in Our Workflow
Per-county pages include a short narrative summary generated with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic) from the same statistics shown on the page. This is a tool for turning a row of data into a readable paragraph; it is not the source of any data on the site. The narrative prompt is constrained to forbid unsourced inference and claims that go beyond the data. The Data Editor reviews the prompt and spot-checks output before publication. When source data is refreshed, narratives are regenerated.
We disclose this clearly because honesty is the right policy — and because Google's policies treat undisclosed AI authorship as a separate problem from AI authorship itself. The fix for AI prose on a content site is not to hide it; the fix is to pair it with a named human editor, a clear methodology, and source-grounded constraints. That is what we do.
Part of the ByCounty Network
NewsByCounty is one site in the ByCounty Network — a family of independent data sites covering property taxes, cost of living, income, crime, schools, environmental risk, water quality, weather, and more. Visit CountyScore.com for the network's flagship hub, which combines every vertical's data into a single composite county report.
Contact
For data corrections, source attributions, partnership questions, or press inquiries, write to editorial@newsbycounty.com. See our editorial standards for the corrections process and timelines.
This page was last reviewed on by Evan Brooks, Data Editor.
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