Friday, September 22, 2023
Breaking the Echo Chamber with Data and Transparency

Collected Times aggregates headlines from around the world and from across the political spectrum, grouping them by subject, to give you a more holistic view of current events.

While the industry norm is for humans to select which narratives take precedence, our aggregates are purely data-driven, with the goal of minimizing, if not wholly eliminating, bias in the results. From the home page you can view the top stories and most discussed terms, and click through to see the individual headlines creating each aggregate. We believe that transparency breeds trust, which is why every headline currently stored in our system is accessible through the search feature.

Our criteria for including a news source include:

  • The source must adhere to AP Stylebook guidelines and clearly label opinion columns as such.
  • The source must cover both national and world events. We deliberately curate our sources to prevent the top stories from being too U.S.-centric.
  • The source must not be solely dedicated to politics or primarily focused on promoting a political ideology. For example, an overtly biased political website (Breitbart) would generally not meet the criterion, but a daily tabloid newspaper with a strong political leaning (New York Post) can. While this determination is largely subjective, and any publication's editorial board usually lands somewhere on the political spectrum, our sources are curated and our algorithm designed to give a comparison of acceptably biased viewpoints.
  • The source must have a significant print circulation or monthly online viewership. An example of a minimum reader base is the most subscribed to daily newspaper of a state or province.

Politics

The criteria for responsible news generally do not apply to the dedicated, quarantined politics section, where Breitbart is a source.

The polics section is curated specifically to have an equal amount of left- and right-wing sources, with an effort to give each voice an equal counterpart to the types of stories they cover and how far left or right leaning they are (i.e., Newsbusters is to Talking Points Memo as CNN is to Fox News). We will not add a new source to this section without a counterpart.

The end product is decidedly more opinionated, but most top stories contain opposing viewpoints.

Current Politics Sources:

Name Avg. Bias # of Feeds
The American Spectator right 1
Breitbart right 1
BuzzFeed News left 1
CNN left 1
Common Dreams left 1
The Daily Beast left 1
The Daily Caller right 1
The Daily Wire right 1
Democracy Now left 1
The Federalist right 1
Fox News right 1
The Gateway Pundit right 1
The Hill left 1
Hot Air right 1
Huffington Post left 1
Mother Jones left 1
The Nation left 1
National Review right 1
NewsBusters right 1
PJ Media right 1
Politico left 1
RedState right 1
Salon left 1
Slate left 1
Talking Points Memo left 1
TheBlaze right 1
Vox left 1
The Western Journal right 1