Fact based, data-oriented news

I have the opposite criticism.

This feels like data porn. There's no love in here. I'm not sure why I should read through this data. I don't know what the point is, or what relevance it has to ... well anything.

Data display is not the same as analysis.

This is one of the reasons why i hate all the stupid supposed "data-visualizations" images that people always repost from the net. They don't provide people context for the information they're supposedly displaying, nor any way for people to view the source of the analyses.

In that light, i am delighted that a site like this provides ways to interact w/ the data and dive back to the source of the data. And I do hope that these guys will keep experimenting, but I kind of have a "what's the point?" reaction at the moment.

The material we currently have on the site is indeed hand-selected, and on multiple levels. We currently do all the research for the articles, which means the preference of news sources that my partner and I have comes into play. On top of that, we also choose which facts/data we feel are most relevant and that's what goes on the site; all of which gives the content a certain bias.

It is our objective to get away from that as much as possible. First, personal source bias is pretty difficult to escape, but if our users send us facts/corrections, with sources, this not only decreases the research we have to do (and likelihood we fall back on our defaults), but also gives a much wider range of sources than we would ever have ourselves.

Second, the information that appears in the Summary tabs will always be selected by us. The Minutiae tab serves as the catch-all for information we didn't think important enough for the summary tab, so that if you feel you aren't getting a complete enough picture from the Summary tabs, you can always go to Minutiae or even Sources for additional detail (and escape whatever selection bias we might have).

There's still the problem that we decide what's useful as far as user contributions, but I think that since we're aiming for factual info, this is easier than it might appear. As long as its accurate, we'll consider adding it, and the only question is a matter of relevance.

I agree on both points.

One thing that is missing from much mainstream news reporting is linking to/referencing primary data in an accessible fashion, which this site seems to do(except the links are not clickable), so that's a development in the right direction.

Thanks!

Currently, I wouldn't consider us much more trustworthy than any other news source, but this is something we intend to combat with user feedback/corrections. Every fact we list or paragraph of analysis has a small [!] link after it, which brings up a form to send in feedback on the item it's appended to. This is meant to make it as easy as possible for our users to contribute if they see a mistake, or feel something is missing, etc.

As far as selection goes, this is something that's hard to get away from; the main reason we have the Minutiae tabs is so we can push information we consider to be less important off the summary tab, but still have it available for those that want more info/details.

Other than that, all I can say is that we are extremely interested in presenting things accurately and completely (though with just two of us, we're rather pressed for time currently).

This (fact-based news) has been at the back of my mind for a long time.

If you stick with it and it ends up working out, this could be the start of something really interesting.

What are your plans to monetize? It seems that the NPR model works somewhat, but maybe there are other ways.

I worry that the market for nonsensationalized news might be small, but again, you have NPR as an example, so at least there's a niche. Worst case, this could probably work as a hobby, facts are useful in that once you put them on your site, they don't have to be updated much.

Good luck.

Edit: minor point: sources could be clickable.

News as a push medium is entertainment. Small-talk fodder. Objectivity is actually undesirable for most of its consumers.

Now, making a useful research medium (when a motivated individual is pulling data) is very useful.

Selectable axioms and interests. If I choose "USA politics" and "deficit spending = bad" then feed me a short blurb when the US federal debt reaches the next $XT milestone.

The key missing from news is "axioms": fundamental notions which mold what the reader is interested in and how news is perceived. (Gotta run, more later if I can...)

Great start. I believe the term you're looking for is data journalism, or data-driven journalism:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=data+journalism

Out of curiosity, what's your tech stack?

Good points for me:

++ Supporting facts/sources: relatively objective news sources that back up their material are definitely an interesting idea to me

+ General visual style: clean, modern, easy on the eye, no major flaws that jumped out at me

And some hopefully constructive criticisms:

- Context/scannability: even if you're going to provide information in depth, I think some sort of summary and a guiding narrative would be helpful (by analogy with "inverted pyramid" writing style for plain text articles) or I'm not going to know why I should care unless I already know the subject anyway and I'm not going to find my way around fast enough to get into the deeper material

- Discoverability: because there is no narrative path to guide me through the content there is also nothing to highlight interesting patterns in all that data or key points unless either they stick out like a sore thumb on a graphic or I find a relevant bit of text in one or other of the tabbed sections; also, there are so many tabs and separate displays that I find it hard to browse while keeping track of what I've seen already

- Navigation: occasional visual details don't quite work, e.g., a two-tab layout with two columns underneath, where the tab labels look like misaligned column headings; navigation is generally rather complicated because there are so many show/hide options, and the navigation controls are not as visually distinct from things like static summary/heading information as they could be

Agreed. And I like the concept as well, but (even in just briefly poking around the few topics on the site) I also felt a lack of trust. This has less to do with anything particular to the site and is more so related to the fact that with pure data, and with little-to-no context, it is impossible to discern any potential biases that one could otherwise pick-up on. Furthermore there is no information on how data is selected (two guys sitting in a room copying Wikipedia? I’m not saying that’s the case here, but how would one know? And even if it were from absolutely reputable sources, any human intervention in selecting and deciding which data to include/not include makes it hard to claim real objectivity).

I think an interesting (though much harder to develop) implementation of this concept would be to have it powered by a complex algorithm that combs the web for sources and pulls consistent data from them. Such a system would essentially verify data accuracy through identifying consistency across a massive number of sources and prevent any selection bias. Just a thought..

Thanks, fixed.