How the USA tab is made
27 sources feed this tab, 27 of them answering at the last check. All of them are public feeds the publishers offer themselves.
Sources
- ABC News
- BBC
- Civil Discourse (Joyce Vance) (magazine or newsletter: at most 2 spots in a row)
- Common Dreams (magazine or newsletter: at most 2 spots in a row)
- Democracy Now!
- Heather Cox Richardson (magazine or newsletter: at most 2 spots in a row)
- HuffPost Politics
- In These Times (magazine or newsletter: at most 2 spots in a row)
- Jacobin (magazine or newsletter: at most 2 spots in a row)
- Katie Couric (magazine or newsletter: at most 2 spots in a row)
- Mother Jones (magazine or newsletter: at most 2 spots in a row)
- NPR
- NPR Politics
- Paul Krugman (magazine or newsletter: at most 2 spots in a row)
- PBS NewsHour
- PBS Politics
- Popular Info (magazine or newsletter: at most 2 spots in a row)
- ProPublica
- Robert Reich (magazine or newsletter: at most 2 spots in a row)
- Salon (magazine or newsletter: at most 2 spots in a row)
- Status Kuo (Jay Kuo) (magazine or newsletter: at most 2 spots in a row)
- Steady (Dan Rather) (magazine or newsletter: at most 2 spots in a row)
- The 19th
- The Guardian
- The Handbasket (magazine or newsletter: at most 2 spots in a row)
- Truthout (magazine or newsletter: at most 2 spots in a row)
- Zeteo (magazine or newsletter: at most 2 spots in a row)
Rules this tab follows
- Every headline links to the publisher. The page shows the headline, a line or two from the publisher's own feed and a small picture when the feed has one. Nothing else is copied.
- The feeds are checked every hour, on the hour. A story drops off 24 hours after it was published.
- Sources are center or left leaning and free to read. Press release wires, sports sites and look-alike towns (the other Albanys and Troys) are blocked.
- No sports, no obituaries, no murders, arrests or crime reports, and nothing about sexual crimes, on any tab.
- Hard news only: opinion columns, reviews, recipes, quizzes, lifestyle, culture and entertainment pieces are left out, going by the story's own section and headline.
- A story that is really about the USA moves to the USA tab, and one about the rest of the world moves to World, whatever feed it came from.
- When several outlets carry the same story it shows once, with the others listed under "Also". A story already on an earlier tab (World first, then USA, then 518 News, then the extra tabs) does not repeat on a later one.
- Newest first, with a lift for stories many outlets cover. No single source may take more than 4 spots in a row (2 for magazines and one-person newsletters), so one outlet never crowds the top.
- Stories about Donald Trump are held to about 1 in 10 unless you change that in Settings.
- The admin can remove a story, or add one by hand; a hand-added story sits at the top of its tab for 48 hours. Nothing here is written or rewritten by the site.
What you can change
- How many stories you see (30, 50 or up to 100), how many Trump stories, whether paywalled papers show, pictures on or off, and words that hide a story: all in Settings.
- Text size, compact mode, light or dark, and the order of the boxes on the front page, also in Settings.
- 🔖 Read later under any story keeps it on your own page until you delete it.
- An account is optional and asks only for a name and a password; it carries your settings, your Read later list and your thumbs up to every device.
The whole picture is on How we get this data. Every source on the site is listed on About and sources.