That’s Not News: A News Site That Rated The News
In 2005 the argument about media bias was everywhere and entirely qualitative. You could say a network was slanted; you could not point at a number. That’s Not News was my attempt at the number.
The premise was in the name. Readers submitted a story, tagged it with the outlet that ran it, and argued in the comments about whether it was actually news. The site aggregated those judgments into a running score per outlet. A credibility rating, crowdsourced, a year before anyone was saying “crowdsourced.”
Rating the news
The scoring panel was the whole point of the site, and it is the piece I would still defend. Each outlet gets a bar, each bar is drawn in that outlet’s own brand color, and the number is the share of its output that readers judged to be actual news. CNN 80%, NYTimes 65%, MSNBC 55%, ABC News 45%.
“News Bug” in that mock is the house entry, scored 20%, which tells you the tone the site was going for. It was not a neutral instrument and never pretended to be.
The front page
Three columns: submitted stories on the left, News You Can Use in the middle, Contact The Media on the right with a picker that took you straight to a network’s tip line. Every story carries its outlet’s logo, its submitter, its date, and its comment count, because the comment count was the actual signal. A story nobody argued about was not doing its job.
Submissions were moderated. 109 stories came in and 28 cleared review, which is a ratio I did not think about at the time and find funny now: a site about editorial standards, applying editorial standards, rejecting three quarters of what it was sent.
One sheet, every module
Before building the pages I drew the panels. Every module that would appear anywhere on the site, as an empty shell: the header bar, the rounded box, the MORE > affordance in the corner. Then the pages were assembled out of that inventory rather than designed one at a time.
The forum underneath it was hand-written too, not installed: adduser.asp, addforum.asp, post.asp, profile.asp, _process/login.asp, _rsc/secure.admin.asp, over a database whose tables were forums and users. No license file and no third-party credit, because there was no package to install.
What it sat next to
That’s Not News was not a one-off. It came out of a run of social sites I built between 2004 and 2006, before Facebook opened to the public on 26 September 2006: PIXshare for photo sharing, the same year Flickr launched; TravelingFools, a travel community whose whole page recolored per section so the chrome told you where you were; and What A Sweet World, a set of properties whose account model assumed a couple rather than a person, with registration that asked for Partner One and Partner Two and a profile that split down the middle so neither half was subordinate.
All of it carried ©2005 Hyperweb Technologies, LLC in the footer. Nobody called any of it social media yet. We just called them websites.
One thing you should know about the front page above. It is a reconstruction, not a screenshot from 2005. Classic ASP needs a Windows server and this code will not boot as it stands, so I rebuilt the page from the site’s own HTML and filled the loops from its own database, viewed the way a logged out visitor saw it. The story titles, the member handles and the dates are the real records. Nothing from the members table is shown, because it holds real names, addresses and passwords in plain text. The rating panel and the layout sheet above it are my original design files, flattened onto white and otherwise untouched.