About Today's News

Welcome to the Today's News beta launch. If you have any thoughts or questions, or any sort of feedback whatsoever, please let me know!

Today's News is a news digest intended to give you all the news you need to know — and none of the news you don't — all on one page. It's updated each afternoon on weekdays, and irregularly on weekends.

The anti-Google News

Google News is the thousand-pound gorilla of news portals; it gives you everything. Other news portals can't compete — and Today's News doesn't intend to try.

Today's News isn't a portal. Portals are about headlines and teasers and making you click to another page. (And those other pages, of course, are about advertisements, and articles written to be long enough to justify them.) Today's News is about reading the news itself, and only having to click if you want to.

Each item on Today's News gives you the essential elements of each news story it covers — not a too-short teaser, or an unnecessarily lengthy article. It just tells you what you want to know, instead of trying to entice you to click to another page or scroll past another ad.

And if you decide you want to read more about any given news item — a decision I hope you'll find easier to make after you've already seen the story with its guts exposed — Today's News can help: Each item includes a direct link to other media coverage, and each headline is linked to a Google News search for relevant keywords. So if you want to click and read more, you can.

News criteria

Today's News is intended to keep you informed, but it is intended as a selective news source, not a comprehensive one. News items are judged for inclusion based on a few criteria: timeliness; impact on world and national affairs; relevance to developing stories and long-term concerns; and mainstream media coverage. You get the news that matters, not the news that doesn't.

News may be posted throughout the day, but this is not a running news site. Developing stories will typically be updated only once per day, often toward the end. The choice of news covered and the timing of its coverage on Today's News is intended to best answer the question, "What's the news today?"

Source criteria

Each news item on Today's News includes a link to at least one source. Sources are chosen for the quality of their reporting and the context and background they provide. Whenever I draw from multiple sources in updating an item, I will attempt to reference all of them (though in some cases I may also draw from articles cited in previous days).

Depending on when you read the site, however, you may find more thorough and informative articles through Google's news search (linked from the headline of each item, of course) than you will by relying on the source materials that were available to me when a given news item was posted.

Objectivity

Today's News is objective only in the following respect: I am aware of no criteria for the inclusion of news items or choice of sources on this site beyond those stated here. Should they arise, exceptions will be noted both on this page and along with any and all specific news items they might influence.

In particular, should I ever acquire any personal interest in any issue, individual or organization in the news, any news or media organization or service, or any of their competitors, I will disclose that interest here as well as in any item on the main page that is either directly or indirectly relevant to the individual, organization or issue in question.

Help make Today's News better

If there's any way Today's News could be more useful to you, I'd love to hear it. I'm still working on the site's concept and execution; thoughts, suggestions and ideas of all kinds are greatly appreciated. Please let me know what you think.
 

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