Pop the Bubble News Roadmap

Pop the Bubble News (opens in a new tab) is a project I made to help automate something I did manually: when something happens, big or small, I want to see how the spectrum of news sources cover the issue. I think of it as similar to an ETF or a polling average: every single data point (article) has bias, but in aggregate (hopefully) we can have a more accurate view of what is going on. I don't like living in a different reality from someone just because of the news we consume.

To that end, I intend to keep making this more useful. Here is a tentative roadmap, and I'm sure I'll update this as I go on:

1. Create a topic-driven view: Instead of just "here are the top 10 latest articles from each news source in 5 lanes", I want the main view to be "here is what is happening. For topic A, we have all these articles from all these sources. For topic B, here are the articles..." and so on. That way, the next time Biden gives and address, I can see who is covering it and how they're covering it in real time, all on one screen.
2. Create an email: I know, I know, we all get too many emails anyway. But something I feel strongly about is being informed without being overwhelmed, and for those of us who don't want to frantically check Reddit or Twitter every 5 minutes, a simple morning/evening email with a curated summary of the day's news is really nice to have. To that end, I want to make the above mentioned topic-driven view into a daily email.
3. Get/create more nuanced ratings: I am currently using just one bias rating system, but there are others out there. There are also more ways to rate news sources and authors than just left-right bias (including accuracy). I'm thinking of things like "this author tends to use extreme language", or "this news source tends to have very short articles", or even "this source is very pro-government", "very anti-corporate", and more. I think that getting to that will be a lot of work, but it is a larger, longer term goal. Update 21/10/2021: Starting to lean towards more of a "there is a 90% chance this statement is subjective", "this is an objective claim", "there is a 75% probability that this is spin".
4. (Added 23/09/2021) Create BubblePopper tool: Ideally this would be a simple tool where a user can paste in an article URL and get back a bunch of articles about the same thing from different sources, and get to see where in the context of it all the article they sent sits.
5. (Added 26/09/2021) Create an Instagram account to share Pop the Bubble's content.
6. (Added 21/10/2021) Either do speech-to-text for TV and radio/podcast news, then run it through all the same stuff as I will run the written articles, or find transcripts and run it through everything. Could be a good way to analyze things I otherwise won't be touching, but definitely low priority and way far down the line.

I hope someone, somewhere, finds this useful. If not, I'm still happy to make it and learn a whole lot. I'll update this roadmap as things change.

Cheers,

+raaid