About Simply The News
What we are
Simply The News is a story-first news aggregator. Instead of a flat list of articles, we group coverage of the same event into one story, so you can read how it unfolded — day by day, source by source — without having to search.
The site has been in continual operation since early 2022, and the underlying article database goes back that far. Every story you see here is built from that running history.
How it works
We read the news feeds all day long. As articles come in, we cluster the ones about the same event into topics (a cluster of articles about the same event) and topics into topicgroups (the longer story those topics are part of). The home page shows you today's topics. Click one and you can follow the story backward through time — that's the part we think is special.
We don't host article content. We link to the original sources so they get the traffic and the credit. When you click a headline, you go to the publisher's site.
What we cover — and what we don't
The focus is international and national news. That's intentional: that's where most coverage goes. Because we pull from feeds across multiple countries, no single country's angle on a story goes unchecked. Local news, sports, lifestyle, and entertainment are out of scope for now — they're a different kind of product.
We don't encourage or discourage any specific news feed. Every source is treated equally in the system. We don't rank sources by how much we agree with them.
What makes the cut
The home page is built around events with multiple independent sources, summarized across them.
If several outlets are all covering the same event, we have independent confirmation that it took place. We pull out what they're collectively saying, and where one source diverges significantly, we flag it. That's the page: what the sources collectively agree on, with any significant differences flagged, and one click to every original article if you want to read any angle yourself.
The tools are there for the person who wants to dig — search across the whole history, open the original sources, follow the trail. But if you'd rather not dig, you don't have to. For them, the home page is already a noise filter: here's what happened, told from the points the sources agree on.
How we handle the same story from many sources
When several sources cover the same event, that's no longer an article — it's a story. We summarize across all of them, but we clearly flag where a source's angle is different, so you can see for yourself the various angles, substories, or different versions. The goal isn't to settle the story for you — it's to lay out the coverage so you can make up your own mind about what's going on.
You can always open every original article from every source and read them yourself. That's the whole point.
Search the way you remember
No other news site lets you do this: search across four-plus years of coverage to find what was said early in a story and compare it to what happened. Or pull up an entire event and watch it develop over time, day by day, source by source. With every source treated equally and every original article one click away, the search isn't just finding articles — it's letting you see how the picture of the story changed over time.
Why we need paid subscribers
The site runs on subscriptions, not ads and not data selling. There is no investor, no parent company, no exit strategy. It's just the system and the people who use it.
A single reader with a subscription helps. But the bigger the subscriber base grows, the better we can build this system for everyone who uses it — more feeds, deeper search, longer history, better tools for seeing how a story actually developed over time. None of that is possible without the people paying for it, because the alternative is ads or selling your data, and we're not going to do that.
So: if the site is useful to you, a subscription is the cleanest way to keep it that way and to help it get better.
This is also your news site
The system is built around what readers need, which means the people who use it should have a say in where it goes next. If there's a news feed you wish we carried, a search feature you'd find useful, or a way you'd like to see stories laid out that we don't do yet — tell us. We read every message that comes in, and the suggestions that come up often enough end up shaping what we build.
You can reach us through the contact page.