👋 About bignews.day
The news, and the stories people tell about it
We read the news the way a folklorist reads tales: what happened, and the shapes of the stories people tell about it, left and right alike.
📰 What it is
Every hour we read the front pages of 145 news sites, from far left to far right, and group their headlines into stories: who's running each one, how prominently, in what mood, and for how long. We follow each story on through TV captions, radio newscasts, over a hundred podcasts and shows across the spectrum, what people retell on Bluesky and Mastodon, and what fact-checkers make of it.
🧩 What's different
Underneath the news is a smaller set of stories people keep telling: they're going to steal the election, the law is being used against enemies, the leader is too old. Folklorists have catalogued the shapes of folktales for a century; we do the same for what's said about politics and public life, in the BND Motif Index. Each motif names a shape, with the claims told in it, the motifs that answer it, and the shows on the left, center and right it came up on. Often both sides tell the same story about each other: see them across the aisle.
⚖️ What it isn't
- Not a fact-checker. A motif describes how a story is told, never whether it's true. Where a fact-checker has looked into a claim, we link to their verdict.
- Not on a side. We file what tellers say, not why we think a story spreads, and the same shape gets the same name whoever tells it. Claims carry no party labels; the shows and outlets are marked by their lean so you can see who tells what.
- Not finished. A language model running on our own computer suggests motifs and files claims; a person checks every motif before it's shown here. Expect some loose fits, and tell us when you find one. How we test the machine is in the Lab.
🙋 Who makes it
One independent researcher, with a lot of help from open language models running at home. No funding, no ads, no party.
🛠️ Want the details?
🛠️ how it works 📓 methods log 🧪 the Lab 🧩 motif index 🧶 folklore