Suggested Reading – Finding your News

Within the True/Slant network, there are 300+ Contributors, 25,000+ articles and tens of thousands of comments. The network is made up of individual Contributors; each a credible, knowledgeable source of news and information. Contributors care not only about their original work, but about the ongoing conversations on their sites. Contributors tend to the overall experience created by their Community – Members, visitors and other Contributors who read and respond to their articles, share with their cohorts, and send messages with tips to Contributors. Helping our Communities find  new stories and people of interest is an ongoing effort.

Pick some Topics of Interest

We slice and dice our offerings by Contributor and Topic. Our site search helps find what you like across all of articles and conversations. There are a bunch of ways the Community can share articles of interest, and we’ve seen steady growth in visitors from Reddit, Facebook, StumpbeUpon and the like. A recent way we’re working to hook up our Communitiy with articles and Contributors of interest is Suggests.

Through Suggests, True/Slant Members can select Contributors they already know they like and allow us to suggest other Contributors who write about similar subjects or reference similar external news sources (e.g. NPR, The Onion, the Wall Street Journal). Suggests’ approach is similar to iTune’s “Genius” or building up preferences in Pandora.

See which Sources speak to you

Genius and Pandora have a fundamental advantage here: music is easier to categorize than news: music has qualities – tempo, dynamics, instrumentation - and accepted categories / genres – rock, deth metal – that can be analyzed and sourced from existing pools of info (the Music Genome Project; Gracenote). From this, inferences can be made (“If you like “The Ghost in You” by “The Psychedelic Furs,” you may also like “Less than Zero” from “Elvis Costello.” If I’m right, give “Zero” a thumbs-up; then I can make refinements to future suggestions.”) News doesn’t have that, exactly: it’s more difficult to find similarities between Bob Herbert and Claudia Deutsch, F. Paul Wilson and Penn Jillette than between The Beatles and Squeeze.

Suggests’ slight twist offers an alternate – and for many, more natural – way to find the news that suits you best. If you want to dive in by Topic or sources cited, you can do that. Suggests is constantly updated as new articles and Contributors appear on True/Slant. Sign in and give Suggests a try – a few hundred Members have already, and you can change selections as often as you’d like, whenever you like.