New tools for living in the Era of Opinion

We are living in what we here at FairSpin like to call the Era of Opinion.  Traditional news institutions are being supplanted by smaller, independent writers and publishers who increasingly take a perspective on the issues they cover.  Perspective-based news is rapidly becoming the norm as more and more news producers turn in that direction as a means to compete for audience.  And the very standards of journalism are shifting as we begin to understand and accept that there is no longer a black-and-white distinction between “the professionals” and everyone else.

The result is a blurring of fact and opinion that has profound implications for our society and for us as individuals.  One major issue is that the old methods we’ve used for years to filter and evaluate the news are no longer relevant to the times we are living in.  When so much of the news we read has an “angle”, how do we determine the facts?  When new writers are appearing every day, how do we decide who to trust and listen to?  In short, how do we make sense of the important issues of our day?

We created FairSpin to help answer these questions.  Opinions are great — they just shouldn’t masquerade as facts.  We believe that by revealing perspective in the news FairSpin can provide a uniquely relevant and timely view of both the media and the issues it covers.

Today we’re taking another big step toward that goal.  We’ve just launched a new homepage that surfaces the day’s important issues and then sorts related stories according to their perspective. This makes it easy to get every side of the story, at a glance.

We’ve also rolled out a new area of the site called the River.  It shows you the very latest news stories collected by FairSpin and organizes them from left to right along 5 degrees of bias. This novel view of the news enables you to quickly see, for example, the difference between a factual news report, a left-leaning perspective piece, and a hard-left opinion piece.

We think these new improvements make FairSpin more useful, and we hope you agree.  Please give them a try and let us know what you think!

Stephen and Dave