Intentional News

A curated public news garden for understanding important developments without drifting into endless feeds.

Why this exists

This project explores how to consume news deliberately: fewer, better-selected stories; clear separation between reporting and analysis; and enough reflection to connect events to wider systems.

The public collection focuses on developments that help explain the connected pressures shaping society, including climate and water, infrastructure and resources, geopolitics and supply chains, AI and work, public health, inequality, finance, and democratic institutions.

The approach

• Prefer freshness, evidence and concrete consequences over volume.
• Give UK relevance priority while including global stories when their significance is clear.
• Look beyond isolated events to trends, dependencies, feedback loops and trade-offs.
• Distinguish what is known, contested and still uncertain.
• Treat feedback as evidence to review rather than as automatic personalisation.

The daily loop

1. Breadth first. Each day a wide scan of the news feeds (top ~20 stories across finance, AI/tech, UK, global, environment and health) is pulled into one readable view, each story deep-linked into the RSS reader.
2. Star to keep. Nothing gets written up automatically. I mark the stories (in my RSS reader) that genuinely matter to me in the reader; everything else is left behind. This keeps the signal human, not algorithmic.
3. Log, then clear. The starred stories become short filed notes with a brief summary. The stars are then cleared, ready for the next day.
4. Sense-check against the maps. Every filed story is checked against the Crisis and Problems maps — both the global polycrisis (Polycrisis, Geopolitical Fragmentation, Economic Instability, Climate Change, Resource Scarcity, Migration and Displacement, Digital and Information Chaos) and the UK-specific pressures (Overview). This is where a single headline gets connected to the wider systems it is part of: is this a symptom of a larger problem, a change in a trend, or a one-off?
5. Then look forward, not just down. Each story is also read against the Envisioning notes — positive, buildable futures (Ecosocialism, Education Cradle to Grave - AI Personalised Learning, GP in the Loop - HITL Health Architecture, Intentional Social Media Design and Architecture, Small Models, Decentralised Power, Gen Z Rising - Skilling Path). The deliberate move: name the problem, then ask what a better version of the world would look like, so the news shapes the mind toward agency rather than anxiety.

The point of the loop is to steer attention deliberately: understand what is going wrong and why, then hold that against what a good outcome could be — for me personally, and hopefully for others reading along.

This is an evolving project. The aim is not an all-knowing information machine, but a calmer and more useful way to understand what is changing and what may deserve attention next.

Browse the collection

Logged articles lists everything published in the three areas this site is for — the news stories, the crisis maps and the envisioning work — newest first, with the date each one was added and last changed. The same stream is available as a feed: RSS.

The explorer and search cover the whole site, including project and personal notes kept here for reference; those are shared by hand rather than listed.