Happy to answer any questions.
(below is the project description I used when posted about it on Reddit)
The problem I have with most news sites is that I can't read only important news: an article about a virus outbreak is followed by some celebrity gossip or another smartphone release.
But even on sites that focus on important events articles are posted every day and there are always "top headlines" — even on days when nothing important happened.
I am forced to make a choice: waste time going through unimportant updates or ignore the news and miss important events.
So I built a web app that I think solves this.
It uses AI (ChatGPT-4) to read the top 1000 news every day and rank them by significance on a scale from 0 to 10 based on event magnitude, scale, potential, and source credibility.
The results are posted on the site: https://www.newsminimalist.com/
I also run a newsletter where I post summaries of all the news with a score over 6.5. On average that's 1-3 articles per day, but sometimes it is 5, and sometimes — none at all. In that case, I just send an email saying that nothing important happened that day.
You can read previous issues here: https://newsletter.newsminimalist.com/
Let me know if you have any feedback or ideas. I'm considering adding new features and looking for direction.
Have you made any attempt at quantifying its biases? Both whether it considers left- or right-leaning articles more significant and where it focuses most of its reporting. (Economy and the US from a first glance?)
FWIW, when I read news I often cross check on different outlets to get a sense of the span, range and sometimes media blackouts, including the ones with extreme bias (like RT reporting on Ukraine). This can give a good reading of the meta-temperature of a developing or controversial situation with a lot of propaganda and bias. In some cases, less trustworthy outlets will cover stories that aren’t narrative-friendly to more reputable publications, and sometimes, those can be really important.
For a service like this, I’d much prefer something analogous to “here’s what different outlets are saying”, rather than trying to make its own judgment about bias.
Subscribed to newsletter.newsminimalist.