The Factual
Aspiring Generalist is an Understandary project.
The Factual
It's tricky (and often exhausting) sieving through the torrent of news saturating our informational inputs each day.
I make part of my living doing news analysis work, so I've been incentivized more than most to figure out methods of filtering and sorting and processing this deluge.
One such method is identifying curatorial sources I can generally trust to pre-sort this information using different approaches and prioritizing distinct strains of data.
I subscribe to a few dozen such platforms, periodicals, and people, but one of the more interesting options I've opted for is called The Factual: a site that aims to de-bias the news by using algorithms to check sourcing, which in turn allows them to identify the most reliable articles on any given subject from publications across the ideological spectrum.
In practice, this generally means they'll send you (or present on their home page) a story with perspectives from left-leaning, center, and right-leaning sources, giving each source a rank based on how legit they seem according to the metrics they use to determine legitimacy (which are imperfect and iterative in ways they explain on the site).
This is useful as a news-filter, then, but it's also a good way to figure out over time which sources are likely to bend which way, and which are more reliable, more of the time. It can help you tweak your internal sense of ideological bias and factual legitimacy.
It's similar in some ways to the approach being used by Ground News—another platform attempting to achieve similar ends—but I find The Factual a little more intuitive and convenient, for my purposes.
The Factual is free, both to use the website and to receive a daily newsletter containing similar content (they have an app, but I don't care for it). I personally (gladly) pay a small sum to support it each month, but you gain access to most of their content without paying.