Help shape the future of news

Become a Newslines Editor

Hi, I’m Mark Devlin, CEO of Newslines. We all know the news industry is in crisis. All we want is news, but our feeds are full of bias, fakery and clutter. Now, I hope that you can be part of the solution.

With your help, Newslines, the ‘Wikipedia for News’, can start to organise all the world’s news into unbiased, just-the-facts news timelines. Check out our Elon Musk newsline, where editors just like you have already added hundreds of news events.

If you’re an exceptional editor, or someone who wants to become an exceptional editor, this is the place for you. If you love researching, writing and editing news, this is the place for you. If you’re a superfan or topic specialist, this is the place for you. If you want to help shape the growth of a completely new form of news, free of bias, fakery and clutter, then this is the place for you.

Our editors have a simple task: Make news better. This is what you will do:

  • Find original news articles about any topic, past or present
  • Extract the current news event and quotations from the article, stripping out bias, commentary and repetition
  • Write and edit a short news post based on the news event
  • Help other Editors improve their posts
  • Posts are then promoted to over 420,000 people on our social media channels (with your credit)

You do not need to be an expert news Editor to start at Newslines. We will train you to…

  • Identify and remove bias
  • Remove repeitition
  • Be as concise as possible

Our Editors are all volunteers. You are free to spend as little or as much time as you like on Newslines. Above all, I hope you enjoy contributing to Newslines and I look forward to seeing what you can create on here.

All the best,

Mark Devlin, CEO, Newslines

How Newslines works

Newslines are interactive ‘news timelines’ that are made up of multiple news events. Check out our newslines for Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter and The Boring Company, where people just like you have added over 500 news events.

The biggest challenge you will have as a Newslines’ Editor is to stop thinking about news articles and think about news events instead.

What is a news event?

News events are single events in time:

  • John Lennon is murdered by Mark Chapman
  • Princes Diana dies in a car crash
  • President Biden wins election
  • Tom Hanks appears in The Green Mile

How are news events different from news articles?

Traditional news articles generally contain multiple pieces of information:

  • The main news event that the article is talking about
    • Elon Musk buys Twitter
  • Other events that happened in the past that are related to the main event
    • Yesterday, Elon Musk said he was looking forward to buying the company
  • Journalist opinion
    • This is a difficult time for Twitter
  • Bias
    • Musk is a favourite of right-wing bloggers

Your task is to remove bas, opinion and other events, leaving only the main news event: 

Musk buys Twitter

That’s it. This is different from the way most articles are written, where you want to add more information for the reader. In Newslines, we remove everything that is not part of the main event – less is more!

Why do we do this?

The reason is that every news event becomes part of a timeline and we do not want to repeat information over and over. Imagine if every post in a news timeline about Elon Musk mentioned he was born in South Africa. The reader would get bored and annoyed pretty fast.

News Event structure

Every news event follows the same format…

  • The event date
    • A link to original news article that you are creating the news event from
    • We always try to use the best source we can, preferably the one that first reported the story.
  • The category
    • Elon Musk, Twitter, etc
  • Event Type
    • Makes Statement. Announcement, Layoffs, Files Suit and so on.
  • The Title
    • We always use last names
    • Every title should be as short as possible
  • The summary
    • An unbiased, just-the-facts, summary, extracted from the news article
    • The summary is always written in the present tense
  • Quotes
    • In most cases the article will include a quote from the subject.
  • Embedded video or tweets
    • Most events will have embedded Tweets or YouTube videos

Now it’s your turn…

Please click the button below to go to the next page, where you will get instructions on how to submit your first news event.