Behind the scenes

From thousands of headlines to a handful of good news

Every day we read far more news than we publish. This page explains, step by step and with no mystery, how a story earns its place here — and where machines and people each come in.

01

We monitor curated sources

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It all starts with a hand-picked list of trusted outlets, country by country: newspapers, radio stations, local newsrooms. We do not trawl the whole internet — we listen closely to sources we chose one by one.

The list is alive: sources that stop publishing with quality leave it, and good suggestions from readers join it after review.

02

Filters clear the noise

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Before any editorial judgement, automatic filters set aside what does not belong: clickbait headlines, paywall teasers, duplicates, empty press releases.

Nothing subjective happens at this stage — it only removes what could never become a story worth your time.

03

An AI reads and scores every story

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Each surviving story is read by an automatic classifier that scores it on quality, how genuinely uplifting it is, its real impact, and its own confidence in that judgement.

Stories with a clearly high score are published automatically; clearly low ones are set aside; the borderline cases go to a human shelf.

Yes — there is AI in the loop, and we would rather tell you than hide it. It applies editorial criteria written and tuned by people, and its decisions are checked by people. The summaries that accompany each story may be generated automatically by artificial intelligence from the original article.
04

People review the borderline calls

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The stories the classifier is least sure about go to a human curation queue. A person reads them, promotes the pearls and corrects the misfires.

We do not promise every borderline story gets read — but everything that is published automatically can be unpublished by a human, and the criteria keep being tuned.

06

Your reading makes the system better

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Every human decision — a promoted story, a corrected misfire, a source suggested by a reader — becomes a lesson the system learns from.

Over time, the criteria get sharper and the classifier makes fewer mistakes. It is a loop: better judgement brings better stories, which bring better judgement.

And what does “uplifting” actually mean?

The criteria behind step three deserve their own page — including what we say no to.

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