See how the world's sources cover the same story — and exactly where they disagree.
SyncNews reads hundreds of outlets across 27 languages, recognizes when they're covering the same event, merges that coverage into one neutral briefing with a citation to every source, and lines up the precise points where outlets contradict each other. No paywall, no account, no algorithm quietly deciding what you see.
1 What SyncNews is
Most news sites show you one outlet's version of a story. Aggregators show you a wall of headlines and leave the cross-referencing to you. SyncNews does the cross-referencing itself:
- One story, every source. When dozens of outlets cover the same event — in different countries and languages — SyncNews groups them together instead of showing the same story twenty times.
- One neutral, cited briefing. It synthesizes a single summary from the whole cluster, with a bracketed [n] citation to each outlet. The reference list can never claim more sources than actually covered the story.
- Where sources disagree. For contested stories it names the exact axes of disagreement — the numbers, the framing, who's blamed, the cause, the outcome, the timing — and shows each side with the outlets backing it.
- A 3D news Globe. Stories are placed on a live, spinnable globe so you can see what the world is talking about and where.
- 27 languages, real regional editions. Including non-Latin scripts — so a Turkish, Russian or Arabic outlet's account sits next to an English one, in its own language.
2 How it works — the methodology
The whole pipeline is automated and runs continuously. Here is exactly what happens to a story:
- Collect. SyncNews polls a curated, health-checked catalog of ~400 live RSS feeds across 27 languages, 22 regions and 15 categories. Dead feeds are pruned automatically.
- Understand. Every article is turned into a multilingual embedding (the open bge-m3 model, run locally) — a numeric fingerprint of its meaning that works across languages, so the same event in English, Russian and Chinese lands in the same place.
- Cluster. Articles about the same event are grouped — by distinct outlet, so one publisher's many feeds never inflate a story — using both the embeddings and the named people, places and organizations involved.
- Merge & cite. A language model writes one neutral briefing from the whole cluster, with an inline [n] citation for every claim and a reference list capped to the real number of distinct sources. The default model runs locally; top English stories can be upgraded with a stronger model.
- Find the disagreement. A separate pass compares how outlets tell the story, extracts the head-to-head axes where they genuinely contradict each other, and adversarially verifies each one before publishing it — so a "dispute" is a real contradiction, not a wording difference.
- Place & localize. Stories are geolocated for the Globe and re-summarized in each edition's own language.
3 Independence & how SyncNews is funded
SyncNews is independent and reader-first. It takes no venture capital and runs no programmatic ad network. The core product — reading, the cross-source merge, the disagreement breakdown, the Globe, every language edition, and all customization — is free and always will be. That is not a trial; there is no "Pro" version of the truth.
So how does a project like this sustain itself without paywalling what matters? By charging for things that aren't the reading experience:
✓ The deal we keep
- Free core, forever — every story, every source, every language, no account.
- Monetize the engine, not the reader — the cross-lingual clustering and divergence data can be licensed as an API to researchers and media-monitoring teams.
- Optional support — readers who want to may chip in to keep it paywall-free. It gates nothing.
- At most one honest sponsor — clearly labeled, never programmatic, never inside a briefing or a disagreement breakdown.
✗ Things we won't do
- Paywall the news or put the disagreement breakdown behind a login.
- Sell your data — there's nothing to sell; we don't collect it.
- Run trackers or pop-ups or chase you around the web.
- Let a sponsor touch the neutral merge or the dispute analysis. Ever.
4 What it costs to run
Transparency cuts both ways, so here's roughly where the effort and money go. SyncNews is deliberately lean — most of the stack is open-source and self-hosted.
| What | How it's covered |
|---|---|
| The news feeds ~400 RSS sources | Free, open RSS. No content is purchased or republished in full — SyncNews links out to every original. |
| Understanding & summarizing embeddings + AI merge | Run on a single self-hosted GPU machine using open models, so the heavy compute is a one-time hardware cost, not a per-story bill. |
| Serving the site hosting + delivery | A small always-on cloud instance plus a free CDN/tunnel. Costs scale gently with readership. |
| The domain & the time | A domain registration and a lot of nights and weekends from an independent builder. |
5 Privacy
- No accounts. You never sign in. Your layout and preferences live only in your own browser (localStorage) — never on our servers.
- No cookies, no fingerprinting. We measure basic, anonymous traffic with a first-party, cookieless counter that uses a daily throwaway hash and honors Do-Not-Track. No personal profile is ever built.
- Links go straight to the source. Clicking a story takes you to the original outlet — we don't trap you behind a redirect wall.
6 Get in touch
Questions about the methodology, a source you'd like added, a correction, or licensing the cross-source data? Reach the builder directly.
batu@polymodal.live