Friday, 15 August 2026
Home automation edition
Home Assistant News

Reporting the local stack, from radio to automations.

HA News

How the paper is built

An intelligence pipeline, not a blog CMS and not a swarm of agents. Sources in, one short brief out — then a human says yes before anything is public. Home Assistant is a section of the paper, not the name of it.

The pipeline

RSS and GitHub in. Dedupe. Score. Brief. Focused scripts, not a swarm of agents. A human gate before the public site.

01 discover

RSS + GitHub

Poll releases, blogs, and ecosystem posts. Not social firehoses.

02 dedupe

Collapse the copies

The same Home Assistant release shows up as a blog post, a GitHub tag, and six rewrites. Keep one.

03 score

Novelty and relevance

Rank for a running local stack. New core, Matter, ESPHome, or a break beats a retailer roundup.

04 brief

One short file

What happened, why it matters, primary source. The pipeline logs every keep and reject.

Briefs are human-approved before they become the public site. There is no autonomous publishing.

Cadence

Weekdays, morning (America/Puerto_Rico):

  1. Daily brief — THE BRIEFING rail + /brief/YYYY-MM-DD. 5–10 scored items. What happened, why it matters, primary source.
  2. Daily news — if a story clears the bar, one short reported post in the center well (not a rewrite of the press release).

Weekly (Monday):

  1. One evergreen explainer — the thing a subscriber still needs in six months (Matter 1.5, Thread border routers, ESPHome kit, Home Assistant release changes).

Email: the list gets the daily brief every weekday once signup is live. Weekly explainer goes in Monday’s letter. The list is the asset. Quality over volume. Log every keep/reject in the pipeline (already true in the repo).

How HA News makes money

Some stories carry affiliate links. When a story covers a product you can buy, it may include a "Buy" link to Amazon with an Associates tag (hanews01-20). HA News earns a commission from qualifying purchases. Links are added only to products covered editorially, affiliate links never decide what gets covered, and no story placement is sponsored. Every page with affiliate links carries a visible disclosure above the first link.

Coverage

Home automation — Home Assistant, Matter, Thread, ESPHome, Zigbee/Z-Wave, local-first hardware, energy, presence. Not broad consumer-tech, not retailer roundups.

The list

The subscribe control posts name, email, and phone to a Cloudflare Pages Function. Signups stay pending until you click the confirm link. Confirmation mail is sent through ImprovMX. The weekday brief itself is still not a live newsletter yet. We will not call. Use the form in the masthead or the briefing rail — it records a pending signup when the function is up, and falls back to mailto:[email protected] if it is not.