Terms of use

These terms describe what 605Buzz publishes and on what footing you read it. They are written to be understood rather than to be imposing, and they describe only things this site actually does.

1. What 605Buzz publishes

605Buzz publishes South Dakota public records and published listings as news articles. seventeen desks publish, covering things like state layoff (WARN) filings, municipal building permits, road work, city and county meeting agendas, auctions, sports schedules and community listings. Each desk names its source, and each article links back to the record it was built from.

No page on this site claims to hold everything a source contains. Each tracker counts what 605Buzz published, not what the source publishes.

2. The articles are assembled from public records, and no editor reads them first

Articles from the live desks are assembled from the structured fields of a public record, most of them by fixed software templates. Most publish automatically, under the byline “605Buzz,” and each first publishes with “Published automatically from public-record data — not yet reviewed by an editor.”

In the machine-readable feeds each article carries a humanReviewed flag, and it answers one narrow question about that one article: does the version you are reading name a person who approved those exact words? An article a template published and nobody has touched since reads humanReviewed: false, and that is nearly everything on this site. An article whose latest version is the one an operator approved — the shortening described above is the only way that happens today — reads humanReviewed: true.

The flag is not a badge an article keeps. It describes the most recent version only, so when a later automatic update from the source files a newer one, the flag goes back to false, because nobody read that version. Expect false almost everywhere, including on articles a person did approve at some point.

editorialTier: tier1-auto-publish is a different fact and does not move: it records that the article published automatically with no editor reading it first, which stays true of every live-desk article whatever happened to it afterwards. If you are building on this data, read both fields on the item in front of you rather than inferring review from the fact that something was published.

3. No warranty of accuracy

605Buzz is provided as-is, with no warranty that any article is accurate, current or complete. Two distinct things can go wrong and we do not promise to prevent either:

• The underlying record can be wrong. If a public agency publishes an incorrect figure, name or date, this site reproduces it. We report what the record says; we do not independently verify it, and no editor checks it before publication.
• The software can be wrong. A parser can misread a column, a source can change its format, and a template can render a field in a misleading place. That is our error, and it is the kind the corrections process below exists for.

Nothing here is legal, financial, employment or safety advice. Do not rely on a 605Buzz article alone for a decision that matters — follow the source link and read the record. For road conditions in particular, check the official source before you travel.

4. Corrections

If something is wrong, we want to fix it. The address for that is [email protected], but mail to it currently bounces: inbound email for the domain is not set up yet, and there is no contact form or postal address, so today there is no way to reach us (see Contact, below). Once mail is live, write naming the article and the specific fact you are disputing. You do not need a lawyer to ask, and you do not need to be the subject of the article.

Every correction we issue is recorded with its reason and timestamp, and each article keeps a complete, append-only version chain showing which fields and which body lines changed, version by version. Articles are never silently edited. The corrections index lists the most recent; every correction an article has ever carried is on that article's own page, which is the complete record. Corrections are stored under one of eight reason codes — that is the entire vocabulary the system can record, not a sample:

• factual — a stated fact was wrong and is now right
• clarification — the facts held, the wording misled
• spelling — a name, place, or figure was misspelled
• source_update — the underlying public record itself changed
• rewording — the article was reworded for length after the template wrote it; no figure, date, name, source link or caveat moved, and the diff below each version is how you check that rather than believe it. An entry headed "Wording restored" is the same reason pointed the other way: earlier wording was put back to the template's, and no fact changed, and no fact changed
• expanded_reading — 605Buzz began publishing part of a record it had always linked to but had not published before — most often the numbered item lines of a meeting agenda, or, on an auction listing, its venue name, street address and map coordinates. The public record did not change; what changed is how much of it we print
• editorial_note — 605Buzz rewrote or reshaped its own prose for this article. It is not counted as a correction, because the public record did not change. Where a person approved the change the entry says so; an entry the pipeline filed itself makes no claim about whether the earlier wording was right or wrong. The diff below each version is how you check what changed rather than believe it
• retraction — the reporting is withdrawn; the article serves a 410 Gone tombstone

We do not promise a fixed turnaround. 605Buzz is run by one person, and where a matter carries legal weight a correction is reviewed before it is published, so timing depends on the request. The corrections page describes the workflow in full.

5. Retractions

When an article is withdrawn it is not deleted, and this is deliberate. A retracted article stops serving its text and instead returns an HTTP 410 Gone tombstone that points at its correction record, so inbound links, bookmarks and search-engine caches resolve to an explanation rather than to nothing. The retraction is recorded in the public ledger under the retraction reason code, and the article is removed from the feeds so downstream consumers stop republishing it.

The consequence worth stating plainly: the fact that an article existed, and the fact that it was withdrawn, remain permanently visible. We will not quietly erase the record of having published something.

6. Reusing the articles and the feeds

The underlying material is public records, and facts are not ours to own. The feeds exist to be consumed — by people, by readers, and by crawlers and other programs. We ask three things, and they are requests about good practice, not a licence you must accept to read the site:

• Link back. Attribute to the article's canonical URL, https://605buzz.com/articles/<slug>, which is also each feed item's id. That is the address a correction or retraction will propagate to.
• Carry the provenance with the text. Every feed item ships a provenance block containing the source URL, the public-record date, a SHA-256 hash of the version you fetched, the editorial tier, the correction count and the humanReviewed flag. If you republish the text, keep the fact that it was machine-drafted and unedited with it. Values the source does not state are null — never fabricated — so treat null as unknown rather than as zero or false.
• Re-poll, and honor retractions. Articles are corrected by appending a new version, so a copy you fetched once can go stale or be withdrawn. A retracted article disappears from the feeds and answers 410; please stop serving it when it does.

The machine surfaces are /feed.json (JSON Feed 1.1), /feed.xml (RSS 2.0) and a per-article JSON document at /articles/<slug>.json. The JSON Feed extension is _buzz at contract version 605buzz-feeds/5.0; that name is frozen and a published version's meaning never changes, so any breaking change ships under a new version string. Version 5.0 (2026-11-07) removed the provenanceEnum and derivedFacts keys from the provenance block. robots.txt allows every user agent — please send a descriptive one, and please crawl at a sane rate.

The site's own source code is published separately under the MIT licence. That licence covers the software, not the article text.

7. If an article is about you

These articles are built from records that public bodies publish, and they can name a company, an employer or an individual because the record does. If an article names you and a fact in it is wrong, the corrections route above is the fastest fix and we would rather hear from you than not. If your concern is about the handling of your personal data rather than about accuracy, the privacy notice sets out what we collect and the rights you can exercise.

8. Availability, and where the site is not served

We do not promise uptime. When a data source fails, the affected page returns an error rather than an empty list — an empty page would falsely assert that there is nothing to report, and we would rather show a fault than a wrong answer.

Visitors from the EU, EEA and UK receive an HTTP 451 on the homepage and on article and tracker pages while the regulatory requirements there are reviewed. This page, /about, /privacy, /why-verified and /corrections are deliberately kept reachable from everywhere, so that a blocked visitor can still find out why and still read how corrections work.

9. Changes to these terms

If these terms change materially we will say so on this page rather than swapping the text silently, in the same spirit as the dated changelog on the privacy notice.

Contact

Corrections: [email protected]
Everything else, including legal notice: [email protected]
Privacy and data-rights requests: [email protected]
Mail to all three currently bounces; see the notice below.