📝 Local news, minus the noise
September 22, 2026
I wanted local news for Wassenaar, but without press releases pretending to be journalism, political parties' own opinions dressed up as reporting, and definitely without gambling ads. So I built my own aggregator.The idea is simple enough: pull RSS from every local source I can find, dump it in a database, filter out the garbage, read what's left. In practice the filtering turned into the whole project.Right now I'm pulling from eight feeds. The municipality's own news, Omroep West, Centraal , Wassenaarders.nl, the Police1, Wassenaar Times, a 112-incident feed, and Vrienden van Wassenaar2. There's also a Google News search bolted on for regio15.nl (for pictures of accidents), since that site doesn't bother with RSS. That one runs backwards from the others: instead of a blacklist of things to exclude, it needs a whitelist of every street name in Wassenaar.Local news has a lot of overlap, and that turned out to be its own little problem. A fire, a crash, a stabbing — the same incident shows up on Omroep West, Centraal , Wassenaarders.nl and the municipality's site within a few hours, each with its own angle and its own stock photo. Reading all four versions back to back is a waste of my time. So every article gets a story ID, and anything covering the same event shares one. The August fire near Wassenaarse Slag is a good example: the municipality's evacuation notice, Omroep West's first report, Centraal 's follow-up and Wassenaarders.nl's colour piece all fold into a single thread. I read it once instead of four times with diminishing returns each pass.
The municipality's own feed, for what it's worth, is fine — road closures, permit notices, the odd royal decoration. Boring in exactly the way a municipal feed should be. The actual problem is political parties. Wassenaarders.nl in particular runs a fair amount of content that reads like it came straight out of the VVD's press office: opinion with the "opinion" part quietly removed, no facts, never a critical word. Similar stuff turns up on other sites too, from groups clearly attached to a party. None of it belongs in a news feed, because it isn't news, it's a party talking about itself.And then, separately, there's the gambling ads. At some point the person running Wassenaarders.nl started slipping in LLM-written ads for online casinos. Tacky doesn't cover it, that's close to unethical, and it has no business anywhere near something calling itself local news.Both problems land on the same site, which is why its exclude list dwarfs everyone else's combined, and keeps growing. The real reason it's such a pain is that the guy doesn't use metadata at all — no categories, no tags, nothing structured to filter on. Every other feed gives me some kind of handle beyond raw text. This one just gives me a title and a blob, so I'm stuck excluding it phrase by phrase as new junk appears. Death by a thousand keywords.One nice side effect of all this: both the 112-meldingen.nl feed and the police feed carry GPS coordinates and a priority code for every incident. Too good a dataset to ignore, so I'm using it to plot a risk map of incidents around Wassenaar, somewhere you can actually see where things cluster, rather than scroll a list of accident reports. Give it a few more months and I can map the most dangerous places in Wassenaar.Aggregating local news sounded like a small job. It wasn't, because most local sites simply aren't built to be aggregated: no proper feeds, no metadata, party messaging laundered as journalism, and in one case, a whole side business in AI-written gambling ads. The technical bit was the easy part. The filtering never really finishes.
Which took an incredible effort to find, only to discover het Police only posted two items in the last 3 years. ∩A weird local organisation that's quite critical of the government. ∩
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@cdarwin@c.im
