Do you know about Local Search America? It’s a site I created last year that contains three tools for exploring local information around America — Local News TV (660 TV news stations, the stories of which you can browse by DMA), Local Search America (Explore government agencies, TV stations, and universities by city/state and bundle their web spaces into Google searches) and Civic Radius Search (Visualize government websites within a radius of a city/state on an interactive map and search their web spaces on Google.)

Those three tools have been joined by a fourth, Local News Feed. Local News Feed gathers RSS feed items from 1003 local news sources across America and aggregates them into one state-browsable, keyword-searchable bundle. Note that this site only indexes RSS feeds, it does not scrape entire web pages. Since the site is only search headlines and snippets, keyword searches should be general. The direct URL is https://localsearchamerica.com/local-news.html .

If you click on an outlet name you’ll get a little popup with additional information including outlet URL and RSS feed URL.

The articles can be browsed by state and filtered by keyword. In addition, I created several “topic” pages that are available via a menu in the top corner. The topic pages aggregate a set of keywords (generally between 4-6) into one page of articles. These also can be browsed by state or filtered by keywords.

I started aggregating the RSS feeds a few days ago, which is why there are only 34,000 articles or so. That number will grow as the feeds are polled every four hours. Additionally I have not finished adding sources, so if you’re wondering why there are no sources in Wyoming that’s why! I’m hoping to add the rest of the feeds over the next few days; I’m confirming and checking them all by hand before putting them in the database so it’s slow going. The infrastructure to process the feeds is in place so as I add the new sources you will see their content appear in the aggregated articles.

Once I’ve finished adding the feeds the next step is to create RSS feeds for topic pages (full feed and by state) and for each state’s full slate of articles.

In order to create Local News Feed I had to upgrade my web hosting and start using a database, which I have never done before (before I used JSON or loaded CSV files if I needed data.) I’m managing the upgrades on the skinniest shoestring I can (entry-level VPS tier at my web host and free tier of Supabase) but even doing this on the cheap opens up a whole world of opportunities now that I can run scripts on my own server, set cron jobs, etc.

Stay tuned; I suspect I’ll be swimming in this data pool a lot in the coming weeks.