Methodology

Feed collection

Balance News requests 39 public RSS feeds spanning world news, politics, business, technology, science, climate, and regional reporting. Requests happen on your device when the app opens, becomes active after going stale, you pull to refresh, iOS grants a background refresh opportunity, or a stale widget timeline requests an update.

Feeds time out independently. The page fills progressively as publishers respond, so a slow feed does not hold every other source back.

Story clustering

Headlines are normalized into meaningful word tokens. Common words are removed, and two reports cluster when they share at least two meaningful tokens and more than 30% of their combined token set. The process is deterministic and runs on device.

This lightweight method can merge related-but-distinct reports or fail to join differently worded reports. Balance News describes the result as a cluster, not proof that every report is identical.

Independent source count

Regional and topic feeds from the same publisher are collapsed into one source family. For example, BBC World, BBC Africa, and BBC Business count as one BBC publisher—not three independent confirmations.

Publisher ratings

The bundled directory contains editorial estimates for political lean, factuality, ownership, country, and state funding. Entries are assembled from public media-rating research, publisher disclosures, organization filings, and public ownership records. The current directory was reviewed on April 29, 2026.

Five lean labels—left, center-left, center, center-right, and right—collapse into three display lanes. Missing coverage stays “unrated” and never inflates the center lane.

These labels describe a publisher's broad editorial pattern. Balance News does not calculate an article's bias from sentiment and does not label an individual claim true or false.

Blindspot threshold

A story can enter Blindspots only when at least two independently rated publishers are present and every rated publisher in that cluster falls in the left lane or every rated publisher falls in the right lane.

This is a coverage observation—not a claim that another side was obligated to publish the story, or that the reporting side is correct.

Freshness and cache

Balance News refreshes on launch and after returning to the foreground when the current edition is more than 15 minutes old. It also requests opportunistic background refresh beginning six hours after scheduling, and a stale widget can request its own smaller refresh. iOS controls whether and when either background opportunity runs, so Balance News does not promise an exact update time.

A local cache provides an immediate page during slow or unavailable connections. If no live publisher responds, the app keeps saved coverage visible and labels the edition as saved rather than presenting it as newly refreshed.

Corrections

Report a cluster, source, label, ownership, or attribution problem at mcintyregrissom@gmail.com. Material corrections are recorded in the public corrections log.