One edition, every morning, then it’s done. No infinite feed, no notifications at ten at night.
The day’s news, told plainly, for readers of nine to eleven. Seven to ten stories every weekday morning — about thirty minutes of reading — and then the paper ends. It is the same paper for every reader. There is nothing to scroll back to.
The illustrations are generated by a machine, and labelled as such wherever they appear. Some copy is machine-drafted. Then an editor rewrites it, checks it against the original reporting, and signs the issue with their name before it publishes. A machine drafts, a person decides, and the person’s name is on it.
This is the whole thing.
Not a description of it. Three cards from a morning’s edition, one story open, and the end of the issue where the end of the issue actually is.
Specimen edition · written in house style, not a published issue
Thursday 20 August
Today
Nine stories, about thirty minutes.
07:10 · Britain
Every bus in Manchester will be under one timetable by spring
3 min
07:10 · Science
A telescope in Chile has taken its first picture, and it is 3,200 megapixels wide
4 min
07:10 · World
The city that turned its car park into a forest
3 min
07:10 · Science
A telescope in Chile has taken its first picture, and it is 3,200 megapixels wide
Illustration generated by a machine
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory sits on a mountain in northern Chile, 2,650 metres up, where the air is dry and the sky is almost black. On Monday it released the first picture taken with its camera. The camera is the size of a small car and takes pictures 3,200 megapixels wide — you would need 400 ordinary televisions, arranged in a square, to show one of them at full size.
In ten hours of looking, it found 2,104 asteroids nobody had recorded before. Astronomers there say it will photograph the whole southern sky every three nights for the next ten years, so anything that moves or changes brightness will be caught by the difference between one night’s picture and the next.
Still unknown
Nobody yet knows how many of those 2,104 asteroids were already known under another name, because the checking is done by hand and it has not finished. The observatory has not said when the first ten years of pictures will be public.
That’s today.
More tomorrow morning.
Four things we have committed to.
Not features. Each one is true today and each one is checkable in how the paper is made.
01
It ends.
One edition a morning, then it’s done. There is no more to load, no reason to come back at nine at night, and nothing waiting when you do.
02
Everyone reads the same paper.
No algorithm, no personalisation, no recommendations. The edition you open is byte-for-byte the edition every other reader opens, and nothing you read changes what you are shown tomorrow.
03
Every story says what is still unknown.
Each one ends by naming the part nobody has answered yet. It is house style, and it is the habit worth building: knowing where the reporting stops.
04
A person reads and signs every issue.
An editor checks each story against the original reporting and puts their name to the edition before it publishes. Nothing goes out unsigned.
How we know this.
The panel below is the one that sits at the foot of every story in the app. The same panel, the same names, on the page that sells it.
How we know this
Reuters— the observatory’s statement and the asteroid count
BBC News— the size of the camera and the mountain site
Nature— the ten-year survey plan
Every story is rewritten from reporting by news organisations we name. It is not aggregated, not summarised automatically, and not passed through untouched. There are no links out of the app, so reading a story never ends somewhere we do not control.
When the news is bad.
Some of it is. Hiding that would make the paper less useful and less honest, so here is exactly what happens.
Heavy story
Before you read
This story is about people being hurt in a war. It is real, and it is sad. Read it with someone if you want to. You can stop any time.
That card appears before the story, never after it, and it says what the story is about rather than warning vaguely.
The story itself is written without false comfort. It will not say everything will be fine. Where there is real reassurance — the trucks are getting through — it says that, specifically, and attributes it.
And some stories are not run at all. There are mornings where the honest editorial answer is that a nine-year-old gains nothing from the detail, and the story stays out of the edition.
Get it.
For iPhone and iPad. Once an edition has downloaded it reads offline, so it works on the walk to school and in the back of the car.
Written for ages 9–11. Seven to ten stories every weekday morning. No personalisation, no recommendations, no infinite scroll. Illustrations are generated by a machine and labelled as such. This page carries no analytics, no advertising and no third-party trackers, which is why there is nothing here to consent to.