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Comment by jaredwiener | Hacker News Reader

If I can self-promote for a second --

This is precisely why we're building forth.news. We know that the next US election will be under constant attack, with a barrage of mis/disinformation from various nation states and seedy domestic groups. The surge in popularity of GenAI and deepfakes will make this harder to detect and avoid propaganda.

Forth.news is a news feed for news. Like social, you can self-curate and follow individuals/topics/organizations you want, in a reverse chronological feed. All of our posts come from vetted journalists, who are who they say they are.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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In what ways will this differ from picking any of the sources clustered at the top of the Ad Fontes Media bias chart? Those are all vetted journalists, too, and I suspect you'll end up pulling mostly from them.

The problem that you'll face comes from the fact that other sources also want to be considered "vetted" but Ad Fontes considers them less reliable. Those sources accuse the mainstream sources of bias (and in fact usually consider the term "mainstream" a codeword for "bias".)

You seem to be stuck with the same problem they have. If you're inclusive, you'll be accused of publishing misinformation. If you're exclusive, you'll be accused of bias. Probably more by one side than the other -- it wouldn't even be a case of "I'm leaving out both sets of extremists so I must surely be moderate".

Aside from my own personal issues with that chart, two big differences: - we're vetting the journalist, so this can include the ever growing number of freelancers/independents and many smaller outlets that would never make it onto a chart like that; and the delivery mechanism.

We are pulling in reporters who work for all sorts of outlets, from small local newspapers to national TV networks, across various types of media, beats/verticals, and locations. We want to be "around the block and around the world," covering local stories across the US and major national/world issues.

Like social media, users can self-curate, to see everything in one place, based on their own interests. For a casual news consumer, you don't need to go to 20 different websites to see headlines.

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