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.
REPORT A PROBLEM WITH A SOURCEHow These Stories Are Made
Trill News uses AI assistance to draft, and a person reviews and edits every piece of writing on this site before it publishes. We would rather say that plainly than let you guess.
Where it applies, specifically. A feature's summary is drafted from a single source article that an editor has read in full, then checked line by line against that source. The Why It Matters briefing beneath it is our own commentary rather than a summary, researched against at least one other outlet's reporting, and every link in it is fetched and read before it ships. Section primers are evergreen background, written once and checked to contain nothing that can go out of date. Headlines are drafted as a set of options and a person picks one.
Trill News Originals are longer explainers that bring together multiple sources, with links beside the claims they support. They follow the same AI assistance and review process. These pieces explain published evidence; they do not claim interviews or firsthand reporting unless that work is explicitly described.
Where it does not apply at all: the Headlines feed generates no text. It fetches RSS, removes duplicates and blocked sites, and ranks what is left by topic match and recency. The words you read there are the publisher's own, and the link goes to them.
Images. Every photograph on a feature is either public domain or carries an open license that permits reuse, and it is stored and served by Trill News rather than loaded from the publisher we are linking to. Where a license asks for attribution, the credit appears under the image with a link to the license. Features without a suitable openly licensed image show our own default rather than borrow one.
What we will not do. We do not publish invented quotes, invented statistics or invented sources. Facts belong to the reporting we cite; the judgment about why a story matters is ours, and we own it. When we get something wrong we correct it in place and say so.
READ OUR CORRECTIONS POLICY