How the sliders work

The sliders lets you choose your news diet the way you aim to choose your food: deliberately rather than impulsively (see this video demo).

What spin do you want?

Two sliders let you choose the political stance of your news sources. The left-right slider uses a classification of media outlets based on political leaning, mainly from here. The establishment slider classifies media outlets based on how close they are to power (see, e.g., Wikipedia’s lists of left, libertarian and right alternative media and this classification): does the news source normally accept or challenge claims by powerful entities such as the government and large corporations? Rather than leaving them alone, you’ll probably enjoy spicing things up by occasionally sliding them to see what those you disagree with cover various topics.

Political Stance

Establishment Stance

What writing style do you want?

Irrespective of topic and spin, two sliders let you choose your preferred writing style. The nuance slider ranges from provocative writing with inflammatory low-blows, ad-hominem attacks, and deliberately ugly photos of criticized people, to nuanced writing in a more respectful style. The depth slider ranges from short breezy pieces with unsubstantiated claims to in-depth coverage/analysis/expose providing good context, careful sourcing, and often detailed numbers/graphics and a more academic style.

Writing Style

Depth

Do you want evergreen or fresh?

The shelf-life slider ranges from fast-expiring topics such as celebrity gossip and “so-and-so tweeted the following” to evergreen pieces (high-impact/novel analysis) that are likely to remain relevant for a long time to come. The recent slider lets you choose whether to focus on golden oldies or the very latest news. Note that your news gets ranked by combining the match to all the sliders, so we can give you the very latest news only at the cost of paying slightly less attention to the other sliders.

Shelf-life

Recency

What topic mix do you want?

Each page shows a topic (say “Crime & Justice”) and subtopics (say “Crime”, “Civil Liberties”, etc.). A pie-chart shows how what fraction of your news feed is about each subtopic, and also the corresponding fractions (marked “baseline”) in the total news flow out there. Sliders let you to adjust these pie slices, i.e., let you curate your feed to have the mixture of topics you want. This affects the ordering of the subtopics and also the news mix at the top and elsewhere on the site.