How SlantReport Works

This page explains how SlantReport collects headlines, assigns them to editorial buckets, and uses AI to produce the rewritten headlines you see on the site.

Source selection

Each of the five editorial buckets contains a curated set of RSS feeds from publications, broadcasters, and independent outlets. Sources were selected based on their editorial identity, publishing consistency, and relevance to American political discourse. Sources are reviewed periodically and updated when feeds change or new outlets emerge.

SlantReport does not pay for access to any source’s content. All headlines are drawn from publicly available RSS feeds. Clicking any headline takes you to the original source.

Headline collection

Every 30 minutes, SlantReport fetches the latest headlines from all active feeds. Results are cached to minimize redundant requests and to ensure consistent performance. Each fetch cycle updates the headline pool for all five buckets simultaneously.

AI headline rewriting

The headlines you see on SlantReport are not the original headlines from the source publications. They have been rewritten by an AI language model to reflect the editorial voice of the bucket they appear in.

Each bucket has a defined editorial voice — a set of stylistic and tonal characteristics that reflect how sources in that bucket tend to write about political events. The AI rewrites each headline to match that voice while preserving the factual content of the original. The subject, the event, and the outcome of the story do not change. What changes is how the story is framed: what is foregrounded, what language is chosen, what the implied stakes are.

If the AI is unable to produce a rewrite — due to content sensitivity, ambiguity, or refusal — the original headline is shown instead.

The Slant Pick

Each bucket features one story as the Slant Pick — the hero headline displayed prominently in the center column. The Slant Pick is selected algorithmically, not editorially. The algorithm considers a combination of signals including how recently the story was published, how many buckets are covering it, whether it originates from an opinion or editorial source, and whether it contains signals of newsworthiness.

The Slant Pick is not a human editorial judgment. It is a computational selection based on the criteria above.

Breaking news detection

SlantReport automatically detects when a story is breaking across multiple buckets simultaneously. When the same event appears in four or more buckets within a short time window and contains recognized breaking-news signals, the hero headline is replaced with a Breaking News callout. This override is automatic and does not involve editorial judgment.

What the AI does not do

The AI does not invent facts. It does not add quotes, statistics, or claims that were not present in the original headline. It does not editorially evaluate which bucket is most accurate or most fair. It rewrites tone and framing only.

SlantReport does not train AI models on your data. The site does not use tracking cookies. No personal data is collected or stored.

Source updates and feed health

RSS feeds occasionally go offline, change URLs, or stop updating. SlantReport monitors feed health and updates source URLs when breaks are detected. If a feed stops producing headlines, that source temporarily disappears from its bucket until the feed is restored or replaced.