Last updated: May 18, 2026
Boone Beat is a hyper-local news site for Boone County, Indiana. This page describes how we make editorial decisions — what we cover, how we attribute it, what’s automated, and what we won’t do.
What Boone Beat is, plainly
We monitor public sources continuously — city and county press releases, school-board agendas, sheriff’s media releases, town meeting calendars, funeral-home obituary listings, high-school athletic schedules — and summarize what’s published, attributing every story back to its source with a working link.
Most of our posts are summaries of other organizations’ announcements, not original reporting. We say so openly. If you want the unedited press release or document, the Source: link at the bottom of every post takes you there in one click.
We do not currently have a paid newsroom or staff reporters. The site is owned and operated by a Boone County resident.
What we cover
- Government — county council and commissioners, city and town councils, planning commissions, school boards, public meetings, ordinances, and elections.
- Schools — Lebanon Community Schools, Zionsville Community Schools, Western Boone, and the families and students they serve.
- Business — local economy, openings and closings, chambers of commerce, the Boone County Economic Development Corporation, and major investments like LEAP Lebanon and Indianapolis Executive Airport.
- Events — fairs, festivals, library and parks programs, the Boone County 4-H Fair, and the everyday community calendar.
- High School Sports — schedules and scores for Lebanon Tigers, Zionsville Eagles, and Western Boone Stars.
- Obituaries — death notices and remembrances of Boone County residents, with links to the funeral homes that have been entrusted with their care.
How we attribute sources
Every post links to its primary source. The link is in the body, near the bottom, in italics, formatted as:
Source: Publisher — Story title, date
If a story is based on two sources (for example, a press release from the city and follow-up coverage from another local outlet), both are linked.
We do not rewrite content as if it were original. If you read a paragraph on Boone Beat that closely mirrors the language of the source, that’s deliberate — we’re summarizing, not paraphrasing for the sake of it. Where the source is doing the speaking, we let the source speak.
What we automate, and what a human handles
Parts of the site are automated, and we want readers to know which parts.
- Polling — the site fetches RSS feeds, iCal calendars, and funeral-home listing pages on a regular schedule. Items appear in an internal review queue.
- Auto-publish for trusted sources — for press releases from City of Lebanon, Boone County Government, the Boone County Sheriff, the Town of Zionsville, Current Publishing’s Zionsville section, and a small set of other outlets, posts are drafted automatically from the source’s own description and published with a link back. The story’s content is the source’s own words.
- Aggregator pages —
/sports/,/events/, and/obituaries/are dynamic listings refreshed every few hours from MaxPreps, school athletic platforms, and funeral-home sources. - Human review — content that doesn’t auto-publish (because the source provided too little detail, or the headline indicated a low-signal item like a meeting cancellation) is routed to manual review. Posts about TV-station coverage of Boone County stories (WRTV, WISH-TV, Fox59) go through a Boone-keyword filter to avoid republishing non-Boone news.
- Original reporting — when we have it, we will say so explicitly in the post.
What we don’t accept
- We don’t take payment to publish stories. Not from sources, not from PR firms, not from advertisers. If a press release lands in our auto-publish pipeline, it’s there because the issuer is a public-interest source we already trust to be on the list — not because they paid.
- We don’t take payment to remove or alter stories. Corrections are governed by our Corrections Policy.
- We don’t take payment to give a story favorable framing. Our framing is “this is what the source said, here’s the link.”
- We don’t run sponsored content as if it were news. If we ever do run sponsored content, it will be labeled as such at the top of the post.
Affiliate links
Boone Beat is an Amazon Associate. Some posts may include affiliate links to Amazon when relevant (for example, in a post about local outdoor recreation, a link to a guidebook). Affiliate links don’t influence which stories we publish or how we frame them. Full details are in our Privacy Policy.
Comments and tips
We don’t run an open comment section. Reader feedback, tips, and corrections all come in through the contact form. We read every note.
Anonymity
We don’t currently use anonymous sources because we don’t currently do original investigative reporting. If we begin to, we will follow standard journalistic practice on confidentiality: don’t promise anonymity unless we can keep the promise, identify the source as specifically as possible without revealing them, and never agree to terms that prevent us from telling readers something important.
Conflicts of interest
If the owner of the site has a personal or financial connection to a person, organization, or topic that is the subject of a post, that connection will be disclosed in the post.
Contact
Editorial questions, story tips, corrections, or concerns about coverage: contact form.