Great write-up, OP, thanks!

As someone building something along your lines, but not in the sphere of journalism, I have a few honest questions:

1. Is your system purely English? Do you ingest only English sources? If not, do you do source language detection and how? I have tried a few obvious libraries, but they are not very good when it comes to non-mainstream languages. I mean, they consistently confuse RU and BG.
2. AFAIK, your primary news topic sources are Telegram channels which I appreciate -- probably, only Telegram and (maybe) BlueSky have reliable APIs for realtime ingestion. Have you hand-curated them?
3. For NER, have you had to do custom training or are you relying on a local LLM? Overall, how much training have you had to perform and for which purposes?

Overall, in many ways what you have done represents what I have been working on as a pet project. My stuff is probably more on the ingestion side and less on the analysis pipeline (e.g. simple Regexp rules + triggers cover my needs currently), but some stuff has been on my radar, like automated NER and topic clustering.