A new news aggregator

1.

A new news aggregator
How tech could help maintain freedom of speech in media
through offering meaningful choices
Lev Gershenzon

2.

Problems to solve
-
Information bubble
Difficulties in assessing reliability of information
Fake news, disinformation, propaganda
Inequality in access to the audience
No convenient interface to receive information from multiple sources
Beliefs are more important than facts and analysis
People are easy to manipulate

3.

Mission
Promoting access to complete, diverse, and reliable news information for the widest
audience. To introduce and make usable the critical mode of news digital consumption while
highlighting contradictory information and conflicting opinions. Empower the user to choose
and evaluate the sources of information and the coverage of news stories.

4.

Solution
To offer users an in-depth view on world events that reflects the key facts from each story, giving
the user the power to choose from the most informative and trusted sources and to access a
variety of perspectives on each topic.
Fully algorithm-driven with transparent principles

5.

Our approach
Aggregate: crawl and extract news content from multiple sources
Cluster: recognise different texts cover the same event
Annotate: find out most relevant and important facts all news sources agree on
and highlight conflicting information, extract and present most important (ie cited)
words and opinions.
Rank sources: Identify (primary) sources of information - most cited among all
news outlets covering the event articles should be displayed on top of the list and
attract audience accordingly
Provide context: find and display related events
Rank stories: calculate the combined editors’ interest to each event

6.

What makes a good story?

7.

event(1)
event(2)
story
top news

8.

Our goals
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To tell a story
To help understand what is going on
To find the sources
To display contradictory opinions and conflicting facts
To retrieve most cited content on a story
To provide users with a broader picture in order to help them make an
informed choice