How We Choose Sources
What we publish, what we link to, and what we leave out.
Two Kinds of Story
Trill News publishes two things side by side. Features are written by us and live on this site at their own address, with a summary, a publication date and a link to whatever reporting they draw on. Headlines are links to other publishers, gathered automatically from RSS feeds roughly every four hours. A headline carries its publisher's name whenever the source feed provides one. Clicking it takes you to the story at its source, either directly for the feeds we subscribe to or by way of Google News for stories our topic searches turn up. We never reproduce another outlet's article on our own pages.
Which Feeds We Trust
Our headline sources come from two places. The first is a hand-maintained list of publisher feeds, each assigned to a section and topic by a person. The second is a topic search across Google News, which surfaces coverage from outlets we do not subscribe to directly. Search results are scored on how well they match the topic and how recent they are, and results matching none of a topic's keywords are discarded. Hand-picked feeds are guaranteed space in every topic so that automated results cannot bury them.
What We Block
We keep a maintained blocklist of sites we will not link to — mostly paywalled outlets, where sending you to a page you cannot read wastes your time, along with sites carrying so much advertising that the story is hard to find, and content farms that publish templated filler. We also maintain a list of subjects we do not cover. We cap how many stories any one publisher can contribute to a topic, so a single prolific source cannot crowd out everyone else.
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