Fair Use Declaration

How Magnolia Coast Sentinel aggregates, credits, and sends readers to the journalism of others, in the open.

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Magnolia Coast Sentinel is a news aggregator building a structure to also present our own content and features in coming months. We gather headlines and short summaries from local, regional, and national news outlets along the Gulf Coast, organize them so you can see the day at a glance, and send you to the publisher's own page to read the full story. We do not republish articles. We do not claim authorship of reporting we did not do.

What we store

For every story we surface, we store only: the headline, a short excerpt (a fair-use fragment), the publisher's link, the publisher's name, and, when the publisher's own feed provides one, a thumbnail image hot-linked from the publisher's server. We never store or rehost full article text.

What we send back

Every story link points directly to the publisher. The links are ordinary, crawler-followable links. They pass link equity to the outlet, and they send human readers to the outlet's own page, where the outlet's own advertising, subscription, and analytics models operate untouched. We deliberately do not frame and add advertising to the aggregation links, as we have no intention to compete with the very outlets we exist to amplify. Our revenue model is to support the work we do with limited page sponsors which will defray our cost of operation, while reserving more robust ad service options for content and features we will create on our own.

How we ingest news, transparently

We believe publishers should be able to see exactly how their work is treated. Our sources are acquired through a small set of honest, documented methods, all of which respect the publisher as the owner of the work:

• Direct RSS partners. We subscribe to a publisher's public RSS feed and use what the feed itself offers: headline, excerpt, link, and, when provided, the publisher's own image. We poll gently, at respectful intervals, and we credit the feed as the source of the work.
• Search-scoped feeds. Some publishers do not expose a public RSS feed, so we use a search-based aggregation scoped to that publisher's domain only. Every item still carries the publisher's name and links to the publisher's site.
• Homepage observation. For some sources, we read public homepage headlines and link to articles directly: headline and link only. No story content is downloaded or warehoused, no frame or advertising is directly applied to external page content. These internal rules are absolute.

In every case, the publisher remains the origin and destination of the story. If you are a publisher and would like to know exactly how your feed is treated, the method above tells you, and we welcome a direct conversation. You can also see in your own server logs precisely what we request, because we do not hide or disguise our requests.

Our SEO posture: we do not compete with publishers for their stories

We care about search visibility for our own pages: the home page, sections, counties, and weather. We want someone looking for "Gulf Coast news today" to find Magnolia Coast Sentinel as a useful starting point. We deliberately do not create indexable pages that compete with a publisher's individual story. A story is the publisher's page, not ours. Our link sends both readers and search engines to the publisher. We never attempt to outrank a publisher for its own reporting, and our structure makes that impossible by design. We do not host the story, we do not duplicate its text, and we point search engines at the publisher's URL as the canonical home of the work.

What we index, and what we deliberately do not

We index our own pages. The home page, every section, every county and parish page, the weather center, and our informational pages are open to Google, Bing, and other search engines. Each carries a canonical URL, a descriptive title and meta description, Open Graph tags, and structured data, so the search engines understand what each page is and why it exists.

We do not index publisher stories. We never create a page for an individual story from another outlet, and we never submit one to a search engine. There is no story URL comprised of external content on this domain for a search engine to rank. The story belongs to the publisher who reported it, so you will never see third party content converted to a URL on our domain. The only URLs for search engines to rank on our site/domain are our own endpoints, never those which contain third party stories. When we link to a story, the link goes directly to the publisher's URL, and our markup points search engines there as the canonical home of the work.

Our robots.txt is written to protect that boundary. The file allows search engines to crawl our public pages, while explicitly disallowing the operator and administrative areas so they stay out of the index. We also serve a sitemap of our own pages only, which you are welcome to review. No publisher story, no archive of another outlet's reporting, and no administrative page is listed there.

This Fair Use Declaration is developed to show our intent, along with transparent explanations of our purpose and process. Much as we do not control third party content, we also do not control search engine logistics. We believe the steps we have taken are responsible, legal, ethically sound and in parallel with industry best-practices.

Should any publisher wish to discuss how we link or why, suggest a different logo, URL or discuss search mechanics, we are here for that conversation at any time.

For publishers

If Magnolia Coast Sentinel can do a better job for your outlet beyond the structure of Fair Use, we are absolutely willing to discuss how we can help. For example, if we're missing an RSS feed, or you'd like help developing a feed which shares your content more competitively, we'd appreciate the opportunity to assist in any way possible. It is our clear, transparent goal to send traffic directly to you.

Reach the editor at editor@coastsentinel.com.

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