Current Status

🔥 Here there! Thanks for Hunting this, Joe. I want to provide some details about what Current Status is and isn't, and how it works. Current Status as a news aggregator, providing a consensus view of the top U.S. political news stories right now from a diverse cross-section of the news media ecosystem. I originally built this to help me source the news for the daily WTF Just Happened Today update. But it seemed selfish to not share it with everybody. This isn't replacing WTF Just Happened Today! Current Status is meant to augment your current media diet and give you a place to "check in" on the political news on your terms. It's time to get out of the endless Facebook and Twitter feeds and back to real news that's really important. One of the reasons WTF Just Happened Today works is that it's a once a day update. You can tune out the news and focus on what matters without falling behind. But sometimes you just want to know WTF just happened right now. And that's where Current Status comes in. There are three things that determine the Current Status: - There is an editorially-responsible algorithm that considers the signals news editors send about a story's news value. If you're not familiar with news-value judgement, check out the "conditions for news" here. - There's a human-in-the-loop curating the list and providing oversight to ensure that the Current Status is a fair and accurate representation of the day's essential political stories. - Current Status is biased toward recent, highly-cited stories, with an emphasis on depth and accuracy. The stars are a reflection of a story's current relative news value.

This looks really cool Matt! Are the lists of "people tweeting about this" from a curated list of politics accounts?

I love the Chrome extension. Every time I open up a new tab I get an overview of the latest shock and awe coming out of Washington.

Pros:

Easy-to-digest, up-to-date, concise, no advertisements.

Cons:

The only downside is that more news orgs don't follow in Matt's footsteps.

As someone who pesters Matt a lot via the live chat widget on WTFJHT, he gave me a sneak peek at Current Status a few weeks ago (probably to shut me up on live chat). It's quickly become a go to stop in my daily news consumption. As a recovering journalist, I can attest that the news worthiness signals editors send matter -- trained humans have good news judgment, who'd have thunk it? -- and it's cool to see an aggregator add more of those human signals into the algorithm. I like where this is going. Kudos on the launch, Matt!

@matt_kiser has been doing killer stuff with WTFJHT and his newsletter-driven sensibility has really been a major asset to that space. The fact that he's extending his empire is really awesome. I'm excited to see what he does next.

I read the email updates every afternoon and am stoked to see this new site. Good work!

😱 Well, the site got hugged by Product Hunt today. All is well and things are working per usual again! Welcome back!