How CRAYON works

CRAYON has one editorial principle: every story, every side. No editor decides what leads, and no engagement metric decides what you see.

A newsstand, not a newspaper

CRAYON is a guide to the day's journalism, built from the headlines and links that news organizations make publicly available for exactly this purpose. Reading an article always means visiting the outlet that wrote it - every headline on CRAYON is the outlet's own, credited and linked to the original. We publish no articles of our own and send readers to the journalists who did the work.

What makes a story rise

Stories about the same event are grouped together, and a story's place on the page reflects the breadth of independent coverage it is receiving, how recently it developed, and our readers' votes. Nothing about clicks, dwell time, or outrage - broad, current, independently corroborated news rises; thinly sourced news doesn't.

Repetition isn't corroboration

When the same account appears across multiple outlets, it is counted as one voice, not several. Story pages distinguish how many outlets are covering an event from how many genuinely independent accounts exist.

Every side, visibly

Outlets are labeled left, center, or right, reflecting widely published media-bias assessments of their news coverage. Stories show the spread across that range so you can see who is covering something, from where - and read the accounts side by side.

AI is labeled and subordinate

Brief story summaries and coverage notes are machine-written, always labeled as CRAYON's, and never affect what ranks. They exist to help you choose which original accounts to read, not to replace them.

You own your paper

Since 1995, CRAYON has been "CReAte Your Own Newspaper": signed-in readers choose their sources and sections, and papers created in the 1990s still work today.

Questions? Contact us · Corrections policy · The outlets we follow