PP Behind the Curtain: PPNewsCorp

Today, let's peek behind the curtain and see how the news sausage is made at PPNewsCorp. You can do this yourself using tools like RSS readers, email newsletters, or visiting websites. If you're really paranoid you might use a separate virtual machine for each source and vary which tool you use to access it.

First, our diligent newsteam reads a bunch of news stories. Most end up on the cutting room floor but a select few are worthy of excerpting.

Each item is saved as its own plain text file and formatted like so:

1. Headline
2. Link
3. Excerpts
4. Optional: Commentary

Files are given a memorable name relating to the excerpted parts. The news source is also added to the filename to help our dear editor avoid putting too many of one source in a NewsBrief blog.

Now the editor takes a look at today's "newsbucket" (folder) and copies any news items that are less time-sensitive into future newsbuckets. In the case of PPN there are three newsbuckets: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Our faithful editor returns to the newly excerpted files and now determines if any should be copied into various special coverage buckets. Once complete, the editor chooses which newly excerpted files should be moved into today's newsbucket. The rest are moved into future newsbuckets.

Now some handy automation tools can be used. Our editor runs two scripts, one which creates a blog collection of all the day's news items and the other which creates a list of all the day's headlines.

The blogTemp text is posted to Minds as a blog and the headlines are used for a promotional post.

But the day is not done for our hard-working editor. Now, they run another script to add hashtags to the items that were placed into the special coverage buckets and then schedule those posts on Minds.

Finally, our diligent editor can get some well deserved rest.

Some other things to note:

• Each newsbucket has a file containing our intro text and this file is added first when combining. We also could have accomplished this by putting the intro text in an echo command in our script.
• Once we have processed the news items we put them into the local newsarchive folder for easy future reference.
• If trying these out yourself, be sure to always have backups of your input files.