This (proof of concept for a) site has been created to deal with two serious problems in modern journalism.
Firstly, as news organizations pivot further and further from print publications and concise televised news hours with enforced standards, people increasingly fail to consume full articles, instead just reading headlines or quick previews which often grossly misrepresent the facts, and only follow up for more information through deeply biased editorializing from others who aren't particularly interested in the full story. Even those who click through for more details are more often than not immediately hit with paywalls or ad servers malicious enough to be dangerous vectors for malware.
Second, the vast majority of news organizations, whether from fear of litigation, pressure from ethically compromised management, or just plain ol' extreme political biases, seem completely allergic to simply printing concise factual information. If a cop shoots an innocent little boy in the back, they won't run a story saying so, they'll go into this weird passive voice like "young male individual found dead after officer involved shooting incident" and if some outright fascist shouts some blatant lies about a minority, you get "remarks from [whoever] spark controversy" at best. In the interest of both brevity and honestly, we will always strive to simply say what actually happened.
Our Advertising PolicyThe only ways for journalism to be a financially viable pursuit are through a subscription model, or selling ad space. As media outlets moved onto the internet, rather than continue personally negotiating with advertisers to sell one off ad placements, everyone got suckered into this system where third party aggregator bundled ads from all comers into rotating slots in banners, with prices all around tied not to people seeing the ads as is the general principle, but instead on how many people click on those banners and get taken through to some marketing site, and of course as no one involved had any real data to go on for how valuable that is, the ad aggregators just sort of fleeced everyone, partied all the money away, and collapsed a huge economic bubble that almost ruined all parties involved. So you'd think people would have rethought that, but no, that's still the standard. And that's not even getting into the aggregators serving up actual malware, high processor and memory demanding irritating gimmicks, and deeply inappropriate ad content, leading to the widespread adoption of ad blocking software for safety reasons.
Between having some basic common sense, and also setting up a website where everything is nicely presented on a single page with no clicking through, we can't and won't do that here. Instead, at the top of the page (and maybe the bottom, and/or various intervals while scrolling down through a large number of items, we have 4 static banner images, locked to a fixed 600x120 animation. These are static images, locally hosted, with no animation or other special code. Anyone can bid on one of these ad slots. If you're amongst the highest bidders for a given advertising period and we have no strong moral objections to the ad, (for the non-proof of concept verison, this will likely be weekly intervals), you send us the agreed upon banner image, and a URL if you'd like it to link to a site. Up it goes. We will likely have some basic information available to approximate the number of people looking at the site for a given period, and that's it. You get awareness, readers get the peace of mind that their web browsers aren't under attack, we get the ability to keep doing this. If this were the final site, there'd be ad submission info here, but as is, uh... if you'd like to advertise on the proof of concept site for some reason, contact me privately, I guess we can work something out?
What's with the kittens? The sort of info we're trying to aggregate here tends to be really depressing stuff, and it's presented quite densely. It's nice to have something cute to focus on if that gets overwhelming.
What's with these categories? Honestly, they're placeholders. Most likely transphobia will eventually get folded into fascism, for instance, it all depends on what balances the site nicely.
What if I want more detailed information on one of these listed facts? Statistically speaking, you don't, but this is the internet, you can double check things against other sites easily enough.
What if I object to the way this information is framed? A lot of the facts presented reflect poorly on people and organizations involved. We have no obligation to try and make them feel good about it.
What about actual factual corrections? If we legitimately get something wrong and later learn otherwise, after double checking, we will remove erronious information, replace it both where it first appeared, and make a note of it at the top of the appropriate category feed.
Are you hiring? The maintainer of this site is living hand to mouth, and the whole premise of this format is inherently incompatible with the standard word count based pay scale for journalism. So for the moment at least, no.