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Signal Hiyuvi

good news about Israel, from abroad and from here

signal-hiyuvi.orenmintz.workers.dev

A site that does you good and slows you down a little: good news about Israel from around the world, and good things happening here, every story with its source.

109 stories and 15 features, each with a clickable source

The challenge

A good news site easily falls into one of two traps: propaganda, or inflating every first trial into a "breakthrough". And if it leans on the press, it inherits the press's framing. The job was to build a site where every story can be trusted, with no politics and no war, in a warm and calm tone.

What I did

Set a source rule that defines the site. A story from here is not taken from the Israeli press but from the body that did the thing itself: a university, a hospital, the nature and parks authority, a city, a nonprofit, or a foreign outlet that covered it. A story from abroad is taken from sites outside Israel and rewritten in Hebrew.
Defined what stays out: party politics, war, "victory over" anyone, and claims the source does not make. Stories that failed this were dropped in review, for example one that rested on a newspaper article rather than the institution, and one about a study that found no difference.
Built an editing pipeline with AI tools, and checks that hold it together. The tool scans sources, verifies and drafts. Every quote is checked word for word against the raw text of the source, and names are written in Hebrew.
Built a static site with no server and no CMS: one content file, a full page for each story with a source box at the end, a features section (monthly roundup, topic and profile), a monthly archive, RSS, a news sitemap and a share card for every page.

The decision that made the difference

The source is whoever did it, not whoever reported it. I decided a good news story from Israel comes from the institution's own announcement, not from the article about it. The reason: the site never inherits someone else's headline, and the reader can click through and see exactly what the institution said, and no more. That also removes any need to exaggerate. The fact itself, from the source, is enough.

What AI did, and what stayed with me

A single AI agent does the editor's job: it scans the sources, verifies, writes and updates the content file, and a separate check compares every quote word for word with the raw text of the source.
What gets on the site was my call: the sourcing rule, the list of what stays out, and the decision to have both a full page per story and longer features. Stories that broke the rules came down even after they were written, for example a rescue story that turned out to involve a disaster.

Outcome

109 stories with a full page, 82 from here and 27 from abroad, January to October 2026.
15 features: 10 monthly roundups, 3 topic pieces and 2 profiles.
Every story and feature was reviewed before going up, and sources are listed at the end of every page.

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