Pittsburgh-Area News Only
There are many news outlets that cover the Pittsburgh area, but they tend to junk up their local news pages with national politics, celebrity gossip, or ads for their parent company. This site aims to be a hub for Pittsburgh area news and ONLY Pittsburgh area news from local and national sources.
The major impetus for this is the lack of a decent Pittsburgh focused Twitter/X account. I got frustrated with stuff that has nothing to do with my town turning up in every local news feed, so decided to build one myself
It is still very much under refinement - if there's a story you think I should have caught but didn't, or something irrelevant slips through, please feel free to contact admin@justpittsburgh.news
Under the hood
The project is primarily automated keyword filtering of local and national news sources for relevance to the Pittsburgh region and importance level.
For developers: this is a Java Spring-Boot project reading RSS feeds from major news sources. Currently it is hosted on Google Cloud Run with a PostgreSQL database. This lovely UI was mostly built by ChatGPT with refinement by me.
Future plans include semantic matching to avoid "same story with different headlines" duplication, adding website scraping for more sources that don't provide an RSS feed and publishing to other social media services, and addition of LLM elements for better summarization and retrieval.
"Isn't that a lot of horsepower for what amounts to a fancy RSS feed?", you may ask. To which I can only quote Mick Jagger: "If it's worth doing, it's worth over-doing".
About me: I'm a software developer that has lived in the Pittsburgh area my entire life, minus some time in the Army. This is an "afternoon" project that has now balooned into a stupid number of hours simply because I was annoyed at WPXI's twitter account.
Source code for the project can be found at GitHub, including the news source list and keyword values.
admin@justpittsburgh.news