What the Courier reads, and how it files it

Not read, and why

Every one of the county’s 31 cities, villages and townships, and every county-wide office the survey found, was checked on October 27, 2026. These publish nothing the Courier can read today. They are re-checked by hand, never by force: a refusal or a robots.txt “no” is respected.

• City of Macedonia: The site’s network refuses this site’s reader (HTTP 403 on every address, robots.txt included).
• City of Reminderville: The site’s network refuses this site’s reader (HTTP 403 on every address, robots.txt included).
• Village of Lakemore: Its website has no news list or feed; the blog it links to was last updated in February 2026.
• Village of Northfield: Its robots.txt asks readers like this one not to read the site, so it is not read.
• Village of Boston Heights: Its news page has no feed and no list with dates that code can read reliably.
• Boston Township: Its website has no news list or feed.
• Summit County Board of Elections: The state election boards’ platform refuses this site’s reader (HTTP 403).
• METRO Regional Transit Authority: Its website’s security certificate expired in September 2024, so it cannot be read safely.
• Summit County Land Reutilization Corporation (Land Bank): The site did not answer when it was surveyed on October 27, 2026.
• Summit Soil & Water Conservation District: Its website has no news list or feed.
• Summit County Children Services: Its releases are listed by month with no dates on the items, and the newest is from February 2025.
• Akron City Council: Its news list shows no dates, and its meetings page is a 13.5 MB page that is not polled; City of Akron releases are read instead.

How an item is filed

1. Kept or dropped. An item is kept only if its link is an https address on the issuer’s own website, it has a headline and a readable date, and it is under 45 days old when first seen. A meeting on a calendar is judged by its meeting date instead, so a meeting posted months ahead is kept. City calendars also list classes, rentals and games; only the meetings of public bodies are kept from them. Duplicates are dropped: the same headline at the same address is filed once, so an agenda center’s revised agenda, which keeps its address, is not filed again, while different agendas that share a name are each filed.
2. Kind. The headline’s own words decide it, in this order: agenda or minutes; meeting notice (“meeting”, “work session”, “public hearing”); alert; roads and closures; courts; police and fire; public notice (bids, proposals, vacancies); community event; public health. Otherwise it takes its source’s usual kind (a court’s feed: courts; a city’s news: news release). Everything an agenda center posts is an agenda. Wording-based filing can be wrong: a meeting cancelled after it was posted still reads as a meeting.
3. Meeting dates. Taken from the calendar’s own date and time fields, or from a date the headline states (“10-26-26 Council Meeting Agenda”). Where no time is given only the day is shown. Entries from meeting calendars are schedule rather than news: they are listed in the Meetings Ledger, on community pages and in desks under their meeting dates, and are left out of the Record, the daily editions, the public feeds and the counts.
4. Communities. An item is filed under its issuer’s own city, village or township, and under every community named in its headline or in the excerpt shown with it. A street named after a place (“Copley Road”, “Akron-Peninsula Road”) is not that place, nor is the town in a mailing address (many townships use an “Akron, OH” post office), and names that cover more than one place (“Akron-Summit County Public Library”, “Akron-Canton Airport”) are left out. “Green”, “Clinton”, “Bath”, “Boston” and “Springfield” alone are never tagged (a colour, a surname, other places); “City of Green” or “Springfield Township” are. A tag means the name appears, not that the item is mainly about that place.
5. Time. The issuer’s own publication time, shown in U.S. Eastern time. The city, village and township sites built on CivicPlus stamp their feeds with Eastern clock time under a fixed “-0500” label all year; the Courier reads those as the Eastern clock times they are. Some lists show only a day, or a day without a year (the year is then worked out from the order of the list). Feeds that stamp items ahead of the clock (event calendars use the meeting time) are filed at the time they were first read instead. Daily editions run midnight to midnight Eastern.
6. Text. Headlines are the issuer’s own, unchanged, except that a “Summit County, OH -” dateline at the start of a county release is dropped. Where the feed or list shows the issuer’s opening words, up to 240 characters of them are shown, cut short with “…”; feed boilerplate (such as “The post … appeared first on”) is removed. The full text always stays on the issuer’s site.

Summit Courier keeps items for up to 400 days; the archive begins Sep 14, 2026, the earliest item the sources still listed when Summit Courier first read them. Public pages show the last 30 days; a Courier Desk can search everything kept.