Methodology

How City Record Digest selects, flags, and presents NYC government notices.

Data source

All notices are pulled directly from NYC Open Data dataset dg92-zbpx (City Record Online), which the Department of Citywide Administrative Services publishes daily. We fetch each business day's notices via the Socrata API:

https://data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/dg92-zbpx.json?$where=start_date='YYYY-MM-DD'

The published archive runs from the date the digest started collecting forward. Every card on the site links back to the underlying Open Data row and to the original notice on a856-cityrecord.nyc.gov.

How a notice gets flagged

Flagging is rule-based — no human curation and no model. Rules run in order; the first matching rule wins. Notices that match no rule appear only in the All Notices table.

Two priority tiers:

Notable Developments — items the rules judge most likely to be newsworthy.
Worth Watching — secondary signals (mid-size capital spend, environmental hearings, human-services renewals, discretionary consulting).

Flagging rules

Code	Rule	Tier
`EXEC_ORDER`	Title contains "executive order"	Notable
`EXEC_ORDER_EMERGENCY`	Executive order with "emergency" in title	Notable
`CEQR`	Special Materials notice naming CEQR, rezoning, or environmental review	Notable
`CONCEPT_PAPER`	Special Materials concept paper (pre-procurement signal)	Notable
`SPECIAL_MATERIALS`	Other Special Materials, except routine fuel/LL63/monthly index	Notable
`BIG_CONTRACT`	Contract amount ≥ $1,000,000 (in `contract_amount` or extracted from body)	Notable
`AGENCY_RULE`	Section = Agency Rules	Notable
`PROP_DISP`	Section = Property Disposition	Notable
`COURT`	Section = Court Notices	Notable
`AWARD_HEARING`	Section = Contract Award Hearings	Notable
`EMERGENCY`	"emergency procurement / contract / declaration / order" anywhere in title or body	Notable
`SETTLEMENT`	"settlement", "stipulation of settlement", "class action settlement"	Notable
`BOND`	"bond issuance / sale / series / anticipation"	Notable
`LAND_USE`	ULURP or landmark designation / hearing / preservation	Notable
`OVERSIGHT`	Consent decree or court-appointed / independent / federal monitor	Notable
`KEY_AGENCY`	Agency matches: NYCHA, HPD, NYPD, DOE, DOC, DHS, ACS, OMB, MOCJ, City Planning, Mayor's Office	Notable
`SOLE_SOURCE`	Selection method or body text contains "sole source", "negotiated acquisition", "non-competitive", "single source"	Notable
`POLICY_TERM`	Body or title mentions: shelter, jail, Rikers, rezoning, affordable housing, charter school, homelessness, eviction, supportive housing, mental health, opioid, overdose, gun violence, youth program	Notable
`BIG_CONSTRUCTION`	≥ $500K AND keywords: construction, infrastructure, capital, renovation, repair	Watching
`ENV_HEALTH_HEARING`	Hearing/meeting on environment, health, water, air quality, lead, asbestos, climate	Watching
`HUMAN_SERV_RENEWAL`	Extension/renewal/amendment in Human Services category	Watching
`CONSULTING`	≥ $100K AND keywords: consulting, lobbying, communications, PR, advertising	Watching

Personnel notices

"Changes in Personnel" entries (hires, separations, transfers) are pulled out of the main notice list and shown as a summary callout: total entries, breakdown by action, and the top agencies. Individual personnel rows are not displayed because they are bulk-published and aren't useful at the individual level.

Routine Special Materials

Three categories of Special Materials are intentionally excluded because they are repetitive and rarely newsworthy:

Weekly fuel price notices
Monthly index notices
Local Law 63 (LL63) notices

Visual hierarchy

Cards with a deadline within 2 days get a red left border + bold red deadline.
Cards with a deadline within 7 days get an amber left border + amber deadline.
Cards with a contract amount ≥ $1M get a heavier red border.
All other cards use a neutral gray border.

Trailing 30-day baseline

The stat strip on each day's digest compares the day's counts to the trailing 30-day median of available data (excluding the current day). Days with no published data are skipped. If fewer than 30 days exist in the archive, the median is computed over whatever days are available.

Trends dashboard

The Trends tab reads a single precomputed aggregate, data/trends.json, rebuilt by build-trends.mjs after every daily fetch. It rolls the full archive up into monthly, daily, agency and vendor time series. Definitions:

Award value / count. An "award" is a Procurement-section notice whose type is Award (this excludes Solicitations and Intents-to-Award, which are pipeline, not committed spend). The value is the contract_amount field exactly as published in the City Record — it may represent a multi-year contract total or a renewal, and can differ from the cash actually paid in that month. Awards are dated by their publication day.
Non-competitive share. The portion of awarded dollars whose selection method matches: sole source, negotiated, non-competitive, single source, emergency, required/authorized or preferred source, discretionary, intergovernmental, or government-to-government. This is a broad reading meant to show how much spending bypassed open bidding; a single large award can swing a light month's share sharply.
Consulting & communications. Awards whose title, category or description mention consulting, lobbying, communications, public relations or advertising, at or above $100K — the same rule the daily digest uses for its consulting flag.
Agency and vendor leaderboards. Cumulative awarded value across the whole window, with a monthly sparkline. Vendor totals are keyed on the exact vendor_name string; spelling variants of the same company are not merged.
First-time winners. Vendors whose earliest award anywhere in the archive falls in the two most recent months. Because the archive starts in January 2026, a vendor flagged as "first-time" may have held city contracts before the archive began.
Month-over-month deltas compare a month to the immediately preceding one. The most recent month is usually partial — it is labeled as such, and its change should be read against days elapsed, not the full month.

Because the same contract_amount figure can appear on more than one notice over a contract's life (for example a Notice of Intent, an Award, and a related hearing), monthly totals track published award notices, not deduplicated contract obligations. Treat the trend lines as a read on what the City Record is publishing, not an audited accounting of city spending.

Filters and URL state

Filter chips reflect in the URL as query parameters: ?agency=…&reason=…&type=…&min=…&deadline=…&date=…. Any filtered view is shareable as a direct link.

Limitations

Dollar amounts come from the contract_amount field or, when missing, from the largest dollar figure parsed out of the notice body. Amounts in the body may include estimates, line items, or unrelated figures.
"Vendor: TBD" appears when a Procurement notice has no vendor listed in the dataset — common for solicitations and intents-to-award before bidding closes.
Notice descriptions are truncated to 1,200 characters in the digest. For the full text, follow the "View on City Record" link.
Rules are conservative: when in doubt, items end up in All Notices rather than Notable. Reporters should treat Notable as a starting point, not a final list.

Reproducing the digest

The pipeline is three Node scripts in the repository: fetch-daily.mjs (pulls the day's notices, applies the flagging rules, writes data/YYYY-MM-DD.json), build-trends.mjs (rebuilds the data/trends.json aggregate behind the Trends tab) and generate-feeds.mjs (rebuilds RSS feeds). All run on a daily schedule via GitHub Actions.