Crossfiled / About

What Crossfiled is

A news reader that groups one event across every outlet covering it, and shows you the whole ranking as four settings you control. It is free, paid for by advertising, and you do not need an account to read it.

The problem it was built for

Video is where most news now lives, and it is the hardest place to navigate. YouTube buries reporting under everything else, and a recommendation feed decides what you see without telling you why or letting you change it.

Two measurements from building this, both taken from real data rather than assumed. Roughly 40% of what real newsrooms post to YouTube is Shorts, vertical clips under a minute. And on a typical day only about 25 of 500 stories are covered by more than one newsroom. Those two facts are most of why the news feels both overwhelming and thin.

How stories are ranked

By four numbers, and you set all four: recency, outlet spread, video coverage and depth. Open the dial and drag any of them to zero and that factor stops existing. Every story card has a "why?" that prints the arithmetic.

Reporting and opinion are not the same thing

Every source carries a format class: a wire exists to report the fact first, a newsroom is a reporting desk with editors, and an opinion outlet exists to argue about the news rather than gather it. Opinion is off until you turn it on.

That classification is about format, never politics. Reason and Democracy Now sit in the same bucket for the same reason, and that symmetry is the point. The whole source list is public so you can check the call yourself.

Crossfiled ships no political lean ratings. We are not in a position to grade anybody's politics. If you want a left/centre/right view, you tag the outlets yourself and the spread bar starts working.

What we do not do

• We host no journalism. A headline, a short extract, a thumbnail and a link. Every click and every video play goes to the newsroom that did the work.
• We do not record what you read unless you ask us to. If you switch on a reading history it is yours, it is shown back to you, it never ranks anything, and you can erase it in one click.
• We write two things, and we label both. A paragraph on each story describing how the outlets framed it, written from their headlines. And a three bullet summary of an individual article, written after reading that article. Neither is reporting, neither reproduces anyone's text, and both sit next to a link to the newsroom that did the work.
• We honour robots.txt. A publisher who asks not to be read by automated tools is not read, and the summary simply says so.
• We do not sell a subscription. Advertising pays for it, which is why the reading has to be good enough that you come back.

For machines

Crossfiled is built to be read by software as well as people. There is a documented API with no key required, an MCP server so an assistant can query it directly, and llms.txt for orientation. AI crawlers are explicitly welcome: we host nobody's reporting and every link points at the publisher, so a citation is how this gets found.

Who runs it

Crossfiled is built and operated by Champlin Enterprises, LLC. Questions, corrections and complaints: kevin@champlinenterprises.com.

If an outlet would rather not appear here, write to us and we will remove it.