The Aporia
The Aporia
The Aporia is an independent analysis layer over the news. It collects reporting from different publishers, groups the articles covering the same event, and examines each one using the same set of measurements.
The purpose is to make it easier to see how different accounts of the same event relate to one another.
The Aporia produces no reporting of its own. It starts with the event rather than the article: pieces arrive from 53 feeds as they are published, and the ones describing the same real-world event are brought together and treated as different accounts of one thing rather than as unrelated articles.
Each account is then measured against the same fixed questions:
Every figure is produced the same way for every source, so two outlets covering one event can be set against each other on equal terms. The measurements are not a verdict on the article. If two outlets describe an event differently, The Aporia does not choose between them: it is not a fact-checker, it never republishes an article's text, and every score here is an automated judgment rather than a statement of fact.
You do not have to take any of that on trust. Every measurement has a defined methodology, the limitations are documented, every article links out to the publisher that wrote it, and where the system is uncertain it says so rather than rounding the uncertainty away.
The point is not to replace your judgment. It is to give your judgment better material to work with.
the same event, reported separately
by what happened, not by keyword
the same questions, asked of every source
you compare, and decide
Most people now meet the news through a feed, and a feed is ranked to hold attention. The most dependable way to hold someone's attention is to show them more of what they already agree with. The problem that creates is subtler than anyone being lied to: over time the range of what a reader sees narrows, until the disagreement on the other side of it looks smaller and less considered than it actually is.
You would not ask a pharmacist to be your physician, even though a pharmacist knows a great deal about medicine. The knowledge is real and the role is different. A single outlet is in the same position. It can be careful, well sourced and worth reading, and still be one account of an event rather than the account of it.
So the useful unit is the comparison. Several reports of one event, set beside each other with the same measurements applied to each, tell you something none of them says on its own: where they agree, where they diverge, and which parts of the story only some of them thought worth including. That last one is usually the most informative, and it is the hardest to notice while reading a single article.
You don't need another news source. You need a way to understand them.
Reading one source
Reading them together
The Aporia is for people who occasionally want to go deeper than the news usually allows. You might recognise yourself here if:
It is not meant to replace the way you normally keep up with the news, and it is worse than a normal news app at the two-minute catch-up. There is no feed, nothing is ordered by what will hold your attention, and the site will not tell you which account is the correct one. Come here when something catches your attention and you decide it is worth investigating properly.
The two lists are worded differently because they are two different kinds of promise. The left column is absolute because nothing on it requires effort to keep, only a decision not to do it. The right column asks for judgment, and a project that promised those without qualification would be overclaiming on the same page where it asks you not to take claims on trust.
The Aporia is free to read and the intention is to keep it that way. It is paid for by donations, and the intended future is one where it largely pays for itself through organisations using its data professionally.
If those two do not cover what it costs to run, subscriptions or advertising may be added rather than the project quietly closing. That is not the plan and it is not wanted, but it is the honest answer to what happens if the money does not arrive, and saying so in advance is better than a reader finding out by meeting it.
If it happens, it will be said here first and the commitments above hold regardless: no political advertising, no selling of personal data about readers, and nothing anyone pays for will change a public conclusion or a published score. What the project costs to run, and what any donation goes toward, are itemised on the support page.
This project publishes what it gets wrong, in a record anyone can read: what a reader would have seen, when it started, when it was noticed, and how long it took to fix. The last two are the ones that say whether a project is careful, so an entry cannot look tidy by leaving them out.
The record is currently empty, and that is not a claim that no mistakes have been made. This site treats an empty correction record as an open question rather than a clean one, because a record can be empty when nobody is checking, and the same reading applies here. Read the record.