You deserve news built for you, not against you.
digest gathers the day's reporting into one clear read, hands you the controls to set your own pace, and points you back to the original sources.
Why we built it
I've followed the news closely for as long as I can remember. Over the past decade that got harder, and not because there was less to read. There was more of everything: more outlets, more urgency, more events that genuinely reshape how people live. Somewhere in there, keeping up stopped feeling like being informed and started feeling like being pulled under.
That experience doesn't seem to be unusual. Most people describe some version of it. They want to know what's happening, so they open their phone, start doomscrolling, end up twenty crises deep before they think to stop, and put it down feeling smaller than when they picked it up. Do that daily for a few years and it settles into something heavier than fatigue. It looks a lot like resignation.
The natural response is to tune out, and that is the part worth resisting. Someone who stops paying attention isn't at peace. They're just uninformed. An informed and engaged public isn't a luxury. It's the foundation a free society rests on.
So the question we started with was never how to give people less news. It was how to build a better relationship with it.
Our aim is easy to say and hard to earn: transform how people stay informed, and improve the quality of their days in the process. You should come away from the news feeling more capable and equipped than when you opened it — more grounded in the world, not swept away by it.
What we're trying to get right
Three things, in the order you meet them.
Separate the signal from the noise
One event arrives as forty headlines from thirty outlets, most of them saying the same thing in a different register. digest gathers them into a single story with all of the reporting stacked behind it, so you meet the event once and then decide how much more of you it deserves. Volume is not information. Bringing the volume down is the first job.
Put the pace in your hands
Structure is what makes difficult news survivable. So digest ships with real controls: explicit session boundaries, a range of mindful nudges, sentiment guarding with hints on whether to engage, and a mute that genuinely works. The point isn't to keep the news from you. It's to put you, and not the feed, in charge of when it reaches you, how much of it does, and for how long.
Send you back to the source
Every story on digest ends where it started, with the outlets and reporters who did the work: their names, their publications, and a link straight to the original. We aren't trying to be the last thing you read about an event. We would rather be the first, the one that tells you where to go next and makes it easy to get there.
Where we stand on the press
digest does not report the news. It could not exist without the people who do.
Reporting is slow, expensive, and frequently dangerous. Someone has to sit through the hearing, file the records request, keep a source warm for a year, or stand somewhere they would rather not be standing. Journalists do that work, and some of them do not come home from it. Accountability has never been produced by aggregators, by algorithms, or by anyone summarizing from a safe distance. It comes from reporters, editors, and photographers, and the institutions at the forefront.
A free press is not one civic good among many. It is the one that lets you check on all the others. Any product built on top of journalism owes it two things at the very least: attribution that is impossible to miss, and readers delivered back to where the work was done. That is the arrangement, and we intend to keep it.
Where we are
digest is early and small, and we would rather say so than perform otherwise. Much of what you have read here is live today: the story generation, the perpetual briefing, following and muting, storylines, session timers, and the sentiment guard. Other parts are in progress and still read like it. We're building in the open and fixing things in the order they matter.
You can see the full working feature set on the features page, where everything listed is already running in the app.
What we won't build
Anyone can list what they stand for. These are the things we have ruled out, which is the part you can hold us to.
- No engagement bait, and nothing ranked to keep you agitated
- No dark patterns designed to keep you here longer than you meant to stay
- No feed that quietly rewards the loudest story of the hour
If this is the thing you've been wanting, come use it.
If you try it and something is wrong, or missing, or better in your head than it is on the screen, tell us. We read everything.