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Add Arkansas scraper - #789

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riordan wants to merge 1 commit into
biglocalnews:mainfrom
riordan:ar-788
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Add Arkansas scraper#789
riordan wants to merge 1 commit into
biglocalnews:mainfrom
riordan:ar-788

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@riordan

@riordan riordan commented Jul 8, 2026

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Closes #788.

Adds warn/scrapers/ar.py and updates docs/sources.md.

How it works

Arkansas publishes WARN notices through an America's Job Link Alliance job center portal, so this reuses the shared warn.platforms.job_center code exactly like Kansas, Maine and Vermont — the scraper is just a thin wrapper supplying the search URL (https://www.arjoblink.arkansas.gov/search/warn_lookups) and a stop_year.

Verification

Ran end-to-end against the live portal: it fetches, paginates and writes ar.csv with the standard job_center columns. The dataset is currently small — the state has posted only a few notices to the portal — but the scraper is correct and will pick up new notices as they're added.

Note

stop_year is set to 2007; happy to adjust if maintainers have better records on how far back Arkansas's portal data goes.

Arkansas publishes WARN notices through an America's Job Link Alliance
job center portal, so the scraper reuses the shared job_center platform
code like Kansas, Maine and Vermont.
@stucka

stucka commented Jul 9, 2026

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This appears to be a perfectly functional scraper for Arkansas. The problem is Arkansas ... does not actually make the data public. The extant data represents just a couple days of 2019, but has, for example, nothing at all from the deep COVID layoffs and closings around 2020q1 and 2020q2.

I swear somewhere I have an email saying Arkansas doesn't release WARN data as doing so would actually violate state law that protects the privacy of companies, but I can't locate the email at the moment.

This is also highlighting that I've been woefully negligent in updating a list of what places have scrapers, and that needs to get fixed properly.

@riordan , I am so very sorry for the hassle here, and so grateful for your interest. I'm going to try to clean up a few things and will flag this for the documentation side of things.

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Add Arkansas scraper

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