About 605Buzz

605Buzz publishes South Dakota public records as news. When a company files a layoff notice with the state, when Sioux Falls issues a commercial building permit, when a city council posts an agenda — this site turns that record into a plain-English article and links back to the record it came from. The sources are read on a daily schedule. When reading falls behind it, the article and tracker pages say so; this page is built once and cannot.

Seventeen desks publish. ten of them read a government record; seven read somebody's own published calendar or listing, and those articles say so rather than asserting an event will happen.

Who runs it

One person: Jason Comes. There is no newsroom, no editorial board, and no other staff. That is the single most important thing to know about this site, because it explains the section below.

Hiring an editor is the intent, and it has not happened. Until it does, nothing on this site should be read as having been checked by a journalist.

How the articles are written

Every article is assembled from a public record. Some are written with the help of writing software and checked against that record before they publish.

A program fetches the public record and pulls out its fields, and most articles are a sentence template filled in from those fields. No editor reads them before they publish. Most go live automatically.

That is why the articles carry the byline “605Buzz” and first publishes with the line “Published automatically from public-record data — not yet reviewed by an editor.” The byline is not a person, and it does not pretend to be one.

The upside is speed and consistency: a template does not get bored, does not skip a small filing, and does not editorialize. The downside is that a template cannot tell you whether a record is surprising, cannot call anyone for comment, and cannot notice that the source itself is wrong. It reports what the record says.

What this site does not do

• It does not verify the underlying record. If the state publishes a wrong employee count, this site publishes it too, and corrects it when the state corrects it.
• It does not claim to have everything. No page here says it holds every filing from any source. Each tracker counts what 605Buzz published, not what the source contains.
• It does not do interpretation, analysis, or opinion. There are no columns, no editorials, and no article says anything its filed record does not. Below some articles, in a separate box headed “Around this record,” the site adds facts it computed from the date and the coordinate that record’s own source published — the sunset time, and counts of other 605Buzz records nearby or earlier. Those sentences state facts and never tell you what to do with them. That box is not part of the record, and it says so.
• It has no newsletter, no social accounts, and no app. The ways to follow it are this website, the RSS feed, the JSON feed and email about one record: the form under each article lets you ask to hear when a value that article publishes — a road, a town, a permit number, an employer — turns up again or changes, and what you can follow says what is offered and what is refused. Nothing is sent today: the sending path is switched off, so a request is stored and waits. A value that reads as a street address is refused whichever field it arrives under. A person’s name is refused where a field is expected to name one — an event’s organiser, an auctioneer, a board’s members — but 605Buzz has no rule that reads a value and decides it is a person, so a name published inside a business field is offered: two of the twenty-one contractors on the permits desk today are a firm with an individual’s name appended. The waitlist is the other one — it exists so we can send you one note when a desk you asked about goes live; no launch mail has been sent yet, and that sending path is not switched on either.
• It is not available in Europe. Visitors from the EU, EEA and UK get an HTTP 451 on the homepage and on article and tracker pages while the regulatory requirements there are reviewed. This page, the privacy notice and the corrections page stay reachable from everywhere, on purpose.

Where the records come from

Every desk names its source, and every article links back to the record it was built from:

• Layoff notices — The WARN layoff notices 605Buzz has published from the state's filings page, each as an article plus a company page., from SD Department of Labor & Regulation WARN notice page.
• Commercial building permits — Sioux Falls commercial building permits, individually and as a weekly roundup., from City of Sioux Falls permit feed.
• Sioux Falls annexations — Land annexed into Sioux Falls, by city resolution, with the acreage the record states., from City of Sioux Falls annexations layer.
• Crop and pasture condition — USDA's weekly rating of South Dakota crops and pastureland on its five-point scale, as a share of acreage, one article per commodity per week. The commodities rated change through the season. 605Buzz reproduces the five percentages and does not add them together, compare a week with the one before it, or call a rating an improvement or a decline., from USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (Quick Stats API).
• Weather alerts — National Weather Service watches, warnings and advisories for South Dakota that the office gave a window of two hours or longer. Short-notice warnings — tornado and severe thunderstorm — are NOT carried: this desk checks once a day and cannot deliver them. Whether an alert is still in effect is computed when you load the page, never stored., from National Weather Service public alerts API.
• Road work and restrictions — SDDOT road-work and travel-restriction listings, one article each. Whether a listing is currently underway is computed when you load the page, never stored., from SD511 traveler-information feed (SDDOT, via its vendor CDN).
• Agenda Center postings — Agendas and minutes 605Buzz has published as South Dakota cities posted them. A posting is a notice that a document exists, not a record of what any meeting decided., from City Agenda Centers (CivicPlus).
• Sioux Falls city meetings — Meetings 605Buzz has published from the city's agenda portal, as the city's own meeting-type field classifies them. A listing is a notice, not a record of what was decided, and a missing agenda is not a cancellation., from Sioux Falls OnBase agenda portal.
• County commission meetings — Meetings 605Buzz has published from Minnehaha County's own portal, as the county's category field classifies them. Meetings the county holds jointly with Sioux Falls or Dell Rapids appear once for each government's notice., from Minnehaha County meeting portal (CivicClerk).
• City meetings — Mitchell, Spearfish, Madison — Meetings 605Buzz has published from the Mitchell, Spearfish and Madison meeting portals, as each city's own category field classifies them. A listing is a notice, not a record of what was decided., from City meeting portals (CivicClerk).
• College athletics schedules — Games 605Buzz has published from the South Dakota State and University of South Dakota athletics calendars. A schedule is a listing of a scheduled game, not a result., from gojacks.com and goyotes.com published calendars.
• Junior and pro hockey schedules — Games 605Buzz has published from the Sioux Falls Stampede (USHL) and Rapid City Rush (ECHL) calendars. The Rush's times are printed as the club publishes them, in the venue's own zone., from sfstampede.com and rapidcityrush.com published calendars.
• Sturgis events calendar — Listings 605Buzz has published from the Sturgis rally events calendar, one article each, with the organizer's own date, venue and price as published., from events.sturgis.com (The Events Calendar REST).
• Auction listings — Listings 605Buzz has published from the South Dakota Auctions calendar, one article each, with the auction company's own date, location and terms as published., from sdauctions.com (The Events Calendar REST).
• Chamber of commerce events — Listings 605Buzz has published from the Pierre, Yankton, Mitchell, Spearfish and Aberdeen chambers of commerce, with each chamber's own date, time and place as published. Five chambers on one platform, not chamber events across South Dakota., from Five chambers' own events calendars (ChamberMaster/GrowthZone).
• Sioux Falls events — Listings 605Buzz has published from the Sioux Falls community events calendar, Downtown Sioux Falls and the Washington Pavilion — with each listing's own date, time and place as published. These calendars, not everything happening in Sioux Falls., from Sioux Falls organizations' own events calendars.
• Community listings — Library, parks and community listings 605Buzz has published from the calendar categories South Dakota cities file them under. Where a city publishes one calendar for everything, its council meetings appear here too., from City calendars (CivicPlus), by the cities' own categories.

These are public records and published calendars. This site does not buy data, does not scrape private accounts, and does not track you to assemble any of it.

When we get something wrong

When we learn that something is wrong, we fix it. Today there is no way to tell us: mail to every 605buzz.com address currently bounces, and there is no contact form or postal address (see Contact, below). Every correction is published — with what changed, when, and why — in a public ledger at /corrections, and each article keeps its full version history. Articles are never quietly edited: a corrected article gains a new version, and a withdrawn article serves a permanent tombstone pointing at the correction rather than vanishing.

If an article names you or your business and something in it is wrong, the address for it is [email protected], but mail to it currently bounces. Once mail is live, say which article and which fact; you do not need to be a lawyer about it. How we handle trust explains what the site can and cannot prove about its own record.

Contact

Corrections: [email protected]
Everything else — questions, tips, partnerships, legal, and privacy requests: [email protected]

Once mail is live, both addresses reach the same person, because there is only one person, so a reply can take a few days. Today mail to either one currently bounces.