Why this exists
Open five tech sites on any given morning and you will read the same story five times, in five slightly different fonts. Not because the writers are lazy, but because a press release arrives with a headline already attached, and the fastest way to publish is to accept it.
The trouble is that the interesting part is almost never in the headline. It's in the paragraph nobody quoted: the clause that says who pays, the job title of the person who approved it, the timezone the announcement was scheduled for, the word "pretends" sitting in the middle of a researcher's summary.
That's the whole editorial idea. Read it properly, work out what it means, say so plainly.
What you get
- The detail that changes the story, near the top, before you have scrolled past anything
- Original writing on every piece. Stories are found by reading widely and then written from scratch, never reworded from someone else's copy
- A link to whoever reported it first, every time, in the body where you can actually use it
- Arithmetic done rather than repeated. If a claim has a number in it, the number gets checked
- Being told when something is smaller than it sounds, which is most of the time
- No launch-day breathlessness. Everything is revolutionary; almost nothing is
How stories get here
Coverage is found by watching a wide set of established outlets and industry feeds, which is how every newsroom has ever worked. What is never done is rewriting what those outlets published. Topics come from the feeds; the words, the structure and the argument do not.
That distinction is enforced rather than promised. Every draft runs through an automated check before it can publish: it fails on any verbatim run of seven or more words shared with a source, on a headline that is a paraphrase of someone else's, and on any story built on another outlet's reporting that fails to link them. A second check reads the prose for the structural habits of machine-written text and fails that too.
Where a figure is calculated rather than reported, the working is shown so you can call it wrong. Where an image is generated rather than photographed, the caption says so.
Independence
Nobody pays for coverage, and nobody outside gets to read a piece before it goes out. Advertising is being added and will be plainly labelled where it appears. Affiliate links are disclosed at the top of any article carrying them, never buried in a footer, and they have never decided a verdict. Plenty of pieces conclude that a thing is not worth the money.
What the site collects about you, and what it does not, is set out on the privacy page, which describes the actual code rather than covering every theoretical possibility.
Corrections
Corrections are the most welcome kind of mail, because being publicly wrong about a fact is the fastest way to stop being read. If something here is wrong, say so and it gets fixed with a note explaining what changed: hello@astraas.tech.
Arguments and better data are welcome on the same address. Or take the RSS feed, if your inbox is already a hostage situation.