About Halftone News

What Is Halftone News?

Halftone News is an AI-powered news platform built on a single premise: every major story has more than one angle. Our automated pipeline finds the same event covered by two news sources with opposing political leans, reads both articles in full, and synthesizes one original, balanced piece — with clear links back to both originals.

Every article published here is clearly labeled AI-Generated and carries full attribution to both source articles. We do not editorialize, take sides, or publish opinion content. Opinion, commentary, and editorial pieces are filtered out at every stage of the pipeline before any article is written.

How the Pipeline Works

1. 01
   Discover. Our system queries a curated set of approved news sources across the political spectrum, looking for the same story covered by two outlets with opposing leans.
2. 02
   Filter. Candidate URLs pass through four layers of opinion detection — URL path rules, source-level blocked paths, RSS category checks, and a final AI classification — before any scraping occurs. Anything flagged as opinion, editorial, commentary, or satire is discarded.
3. 03
   Scrape. Both approved article URLs are fetched in full using Jina Reader, our primary scraper. Firecrawl serves as a fallback only when Jina cannot access a page. We check each source domain's robots.txt monthly and automatically deactivate any domain that disallows crawling.
4. 04
   Classify & Moderate. AI evaluates both articles for factual content type, detects harmful content, and assigns a quality score. Articles scoring below 6 out of 10 are rejected before any synthesis occurs.
5. 05
   Synthesize. A separate AI model rewrites both sources into one original, balanced article of 300–400 words. No sentence is copied verbatim. The rewrite is instructed to present factual content without editorializing, and to self-audit for framing bias before finalizing.
6. 06
   Label & Attribute. The published article is stamped with the AI-Generated label, a Balanced View badge, and direct links to both source articles. The lean of each source is stored and displayed. We randomize which source appears as Source A versus Source B to prevent readers from associating a color with a political lean.
7. 07
   Publish. Articles publish on a staggered schedule — up to 13 per day. The sitemap regenerates automatically on every publish. Duplicate detection runs before and after scraping to prevent the same story from appearing twice.

Source Selection & Lean Scoring

Every source in our pipeline is manually vetted and assigned a lean score on a scale of –5 (far left) to +5 (far right) and a credibility rating. Sources are only paired when they carry opposing leans — left paired with right, or either paired with center. Two sources of the same lean are never paired.

All active source domains are checked against their robots.txt on a monthly basis. Any domain that updates its robots.txt to disallow automated crawling is automatically deactivated from the pipeline.

Our launch pipeline sources are NPR, The Guardian, Fox News, Washington Examiner, and The Hill. Additional sources are added as the platform scales.

AI Transparency

Every article on Halftone News is synthesized by AI and is labeled as such. The AI-Generated label appears before the article body on every page, in compliance with the FTC clear-and-conspicuous disclosure standard and the EU AI Act Article 50 labeling requirements.

AI is used for three tasks only: content classification and moderation, article synthesis from two verified source articles, and image generation for thumbnails. AI is never used to fabricate quotes, sources, or facts. All facts in every published article are drawn directly from the two credited source articles.

User-submitted articles use a higher-quality AI model (Claude Sonnet) to ensure editorial accuracy for contributor-attributed content. User submissions are also subject to manual review during an account's first three submissions.

Independent Voices

The Independent Voices section features content from independent journalists, creators, and outlets outside our mainstream approved-source list. Independent articles do not appear in the main news feed — they are clearly separated so readers always understand what they are reading.

Independent articles are either paired with an opposing-lean source (full synthesis, same pipeline) or published as a neutral 150–200 word AI summary with a prominent link back to the original. All independent articles carry a disclaimer noting that the piece originates from an independent source and has not been cross-referenced against an opposing perspective.

Contributor Program

Registered users can submit article URLs for consideration. Every submission passes the same opinion filter, duplicate check, AI classification, harmful content scan, and quality gate as our automated pipeline. Approved submissions are published with a Submitted by credit and both source links.

Contributors who reach 50 published articles earn a Verified Press badge automatically. Journalists and creators from pre-approved independent outlets may receive a Verified Voice badge upon email domain verification at signup.

Corrections & Takedowns

If you believe a published article contains a factual error, please contact us at corrections@halftone.news. Include the article URL and a description of the error. We review all correction requests and publish corrections on the article page when warranted.

If you are a rights holder and believe content on Halftone News infringes your copyright, please submit a takedown request via our DMCA page. We respond to valid DMCA requests within 24 hours.