Newsy

01What it is

Newsy is a live news reader built from publishers' own RSS feeds: eleven wires across five desks, Today, Business, Intl, Middle East and USA. Repeated headlines are dropped, the rest are set newest first, and the page re-reads every 100 seconds. There is no personalisation and no ranking model, and every figure on the page is counted from the stories it holds. The wires are BBC World, The New York Times, NPR, DW, Al Jazeera, WSJ Markets, CNBC, Fortune, BBC Middle East, The Hill and Politico (newsy2.js:47-78).

It is for readers who want the latest headlines from named outlets, in time order, without an algorithm or an account.

02How it works

The engine (newsysite/newsy2.js) first tries a pre-built feed.json, made on a schedule, and falls back to the eleven wires if that file is missing, stale or thin. Each wire goes through the site's own relay, rss-proxy.php, which only fetches hosts drawn from the feed list, re-checks every redirect hop and refuses literal IPs and private ranges, so an allowed host cannot bounce it to a cloud metadata address (rss-proxy.php:11-22). The relay's fresh window is 30 seconds and the page polls every 100, so each poll can bring something new (newsy2.js:24-29, 91).

Headlines are de-duplicated in the browser on a key: lower-cased, outlet suffix, punctuation and short common words removed, cut to 72 characters. Then they are sorted newest first, with undated items last (newsy2.js:288-316). One detail shows the upkeep: the old WSJ address still answered 200, but its newest item was twenty months old, so the page moved to Dow Jones' live host (newsy2.js:56-59).

03The test

That last row matters. The rule catches near-identical wording only, so the same event told five ways by five outlets stays five items. The relay itself was quick: all eleven wires answered in under a fifth of a second, and DW alone supplied over a third of the 383 items, worth knowing when you read the Today desk.

04Against the field

Each comparator was read on its own site on the date shown. We credit what each does better before saying where Newsy goes further.

05Where it falls short

1. Duplicate removal is literal. On 203 Today headlines it found no matches, so one event can appear five times.
2. Eleven English-language outlets, mostly American and British, and no way to add or drop a source.
3. It needs the site's relay; where the relay is missing the page cannot read the wires, and says so.
4. Headlines and summaries only, cut at 260 characters; reading the story means going to the publisher.

06Filing note

File underHeadlines in the order they were published, from outlets you can name.

Newsy keeps a simple promise and does real work to keep it true: a fenced relay, a poll matched to its cache, a dead feed caught and replaced, counts that are counted. Its weak spot is exactly what the big aggregators do well, grouping one story across outlets. Read it for the clock; use Ground News or Google News for the shape of a story.

Open Newsy on labs.llc →

07Spec sheet