Ghanaian news sites reorganise, paywall and go dark, and reporting on illegal mining disappears with them. This crawler reads the newsrooms every six hours, keeps what is about galamsey, and holds it — headline, date, place, figures, source and a snapshot — in one archive you can search.
The archive
Every record keeps a link to the original and to a snapshot, so it survives the page being taken down.
What the archive holds
Counts of records, not of events. A region appearing rarely may mean little coverage rather than little mining.
By subject
By region
Provenance
Outlets ranked by how much of this archive they wrote, with the date each was last seen covering illegal mining.
How it works
A scheduled job, not a live service. News sites do not let a browser fetch their feeds directly, so the crawler runs on a timer and commits what it finds.
READ
RSS from Ghanaian newsrooms plus targeted news queries for galamsey, NAIMOS operations, forest reserves and river turbidity.
FILTER
An item survives only if it mentions illegal mining, excavators, changfan, forest reserves or a named task force.
CLASSIFY
Each item is typed by subject, and any figures for arrests, excavators, hectares or NTU are pulled out of the text.
PLACE
Text is matched against a gazetteer of 140 Ghanaian mining towns, reserves and rivers. Nothing is guessed at.
KEEP
New links are pushed to the Internet Archive in the background, so a copy survives even when the original page is taken down.
FOLLOW
Records sharing distinctive names — a company, a concession, a defendant — are threaded together, so a case can be read from the raid through to the verdict.
REACH BACK
A separate pass mines the GDELT news index and the Internet Archive's URL index for coverage published long before this crawler existed.
How far back it reaches
Records marked verified were read from the published source and checked by hand; the crawler never overwrites them. Everything else carries the outlet's own headline and is a lead, not a finding. Figures are reproduced as their sources state them. Named individuals and companies appear only as their sources named them, and allegations are recorded as allegations.
Community reporting
The crawler only finds what newsrooms publish. Some things nobody has reported yet.
191 or 112. Ask for the District Commander if equipment is on site now.Nothing you type here leaves your device. This form builds text for you to send yourself — it is not connected to any agency.