📰 The Dispatch

Real Journalism. Zero Humans in the Newsroom.

The Dispatch is an autonomous, AI-native newsroom that proves artificial intelligence can produce journalism worthy of the world's best publications. Every article is independently sourced, researched, written, and fact-checked entirely by an automated AI pipeline—with zero human intervention.

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⚡ Key Features

• 100% Autonomous Pipeline: A cron-triggered GitHub Action runs daily, discovering, writing, and publishing stories using Gemini AI.
• Radical Transparency: Every published article includes a public "Pipeline Record" detailing the exact steps, sources, timestamps, and verification checks performed.
• Virlo Trending Intelligence: Real-time social trending signals from the Virlo API are interleaved directly into our cross-fading, dual-badge Live Ticker.
• Editorial Guardrails: Built-in safeguards against hallucination, bias, and category drift.
• High-Fidelity UI/UX: A bespoke, responsive Next.js frontend with client-side instant search, dynamic date sorting, frosted glass mobile navigation, and strict typographic hierarchies.

🛠️ The 4-Stage Editorial Pipeline

The Dispatch operates on a rigorous, four-stage background process:

1. Source Discovery (stage1-discovery.ts): Monitors 34+ top-tier RSS feeds across 6 beats. It deduplicates stories and checks against already-published articles alongside trending intelligence from Virlo.
2. Fact Extraction (stage2-extraction.ts): Strips the fluff and instructs Gemini to securely extract raw, structured factual claims (quotes, statistics, events) with high-confidence thresholds.
3. Editorial Synthesis (stage3-synthesis.ts): Compiles the raw facts into a structured, inverted-pyramid news article (essential news first, context later) utilizing a professional journalistic tone.
4. Quality Review (stage4-review.ts): A secondary AI review phase grades the article on bias, readability, and factual fidelity before generating the final JSON artifact.

💻 Tech Stack

• Framework: Next.js (App Router), React, TypeScript
• Styling: Custom Vanilla CSS Design System (globals.css)
• AI Provider: Google Gemini API
• Trending API: Virlo API
• Workflow / CI/CD: GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/pipeline.yml)
• Deployment: Vercel

🚀 Running Locally

1. Clone the repository and install dependencies:

   npm install

2. Set up Environment Variables: Create a .env.local file in the root directory:

   # Required for the AI Editorial Pipeline
   GEMINI_API_KEY=your_gemini_api_key_here
   
   # Optional: Add up to 10 keys for rotation to avoid rate limits
   # GEMINI_API_KEY_2=...
   
   # Optional: Enables the 'Trending' ticker
   VIRLO_API_KEY=your_virlo_api_key_here

3. Start the Frontend Service:

   npm run dev

   Open http://localhost:3000 to view the application.

4. Run the AI Pipeline Manually: To test the autonomous generation of new articles locally:

   npm run pipeline:run

⚖️ Ethics & Transparency

We believe transparency is not an option when the writer is a machine. The Dispatch enforces a strict "no hallucination" rule where all facts trace to the original source, automated bias detection catches one-sided framing, and immediate fail-closed behaviors prevent poor-quality articles from seeing the light of day.

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The Dispatch is an AI-native newsroom experiment. Built with editorial rigor. Powered by artificial intelligence.