#News Challenge Category Strategy
#Target
50 published news fact challenges per day, 1 challenge per fact.
#Provider
Event Registry (NewsAPI.ai) — full article body on free tier (avg 3,000-5,000 chars per article).
#Token Budget
| Metric | Value |
|---|
| Target facts/day | 50 publishable |
| Articles needed/day | ~84 (accounting for quality + notability yield) |
| Search tokens/day | ~5 (20 articles per token) |
| Tokens/month | ~150 |
| Free tier allocation | 2,000 (one-time) |
| Runway at free tier | ~13 months |
#Starting Categories (5)
| # | Search Keyword | Eko Taxonomy | Avg Body Length | Rationale |
|---|
| 1 | science | science | 5,093 chars | High notability, verifiable facts (studies, papers, discoveries) |
| 2 | technology | technology | 4,436 chars | Constant news flow, concrete facts (product launches, funding, specs) |
| 3 | sports | sports | 5,167 chars | Highest content quality, extremely verifiable facts (scores, dates, records) |
| 4 | health | health-medicine | 4,778 chars | Strong reader interest, citable sources (journals, WHO, CDC) |
| 5 | business | business | 4,066 chars | Quantitative facts (revenue, deals, market data), solid notability signals |
#Pipeline Yield (observed from smoke test)
| Stage | Yield |
|---|
| Articles fetched → pass 400-char quality filter | ~90% |
| Usable articles → facts extracted | ~100% |
| Facts → above 0.6 notability threshold | ~67% |
| Facts → pass validation | ~100% |
| End-to-end: articles → publishable facts | ~60% |
#Categories Deferred
| Keyword | Eko Taxonomy | Reason to defer |
|---|
| entertainment | entertainment | Lowest content quality (3,175 chars avg), facts tend toward opinion/gossip |
| politics | governments | Higher risk of bias-related validation issues, subjective facts |
| current-events | current-events | Too broad as keyword; other 5 categories already capture newsworthy events |
#Scaling
Adding categories requires no code changes — update active topic categories in the DB and the cron dispatches automatically. Each additional category adds ~1 token/day (~30 tokens/month).
| Categories | Tokens/month | Free tier runway |
|---|
| 5 | 150 | 13 months |
| 8 | 240 | 8 months |
| 10 | 300 | 6 months |
#Paid plan threshold
The $90/month 5K plan becomes worthwhile when running 10+ categories at higher frequency, or when historical data access (back to 2014) is needed for evergreen fact enrichment.