News monitoring gets difficult when pagination changes the evidence set underneath an answer. My rule is simple: use staged retrieval with explicit collections, bounded queries, and source context that survives every page. That keeps an answer replaceable across providers because the application depends on a contract, not a vendor-shaped response.

Short answer: define a retrieval contract first, then combine lexical discovery with semantic ranking, tenant filters, and stable cursors; emit a source URL or document ID for every cited chunk.

The incident lesson: pagination is part of grounding

I model a failed search as an incident even before an alert fires. A reporter asks, “What changed in the coastal policy this week?” The service returns a fluent summary, but page two was fetched with a new relevance snapshot, one article moved ahead of another, and the citation now points at a chunk the model never saw. The text sounds right.…