It was a dark and stormy night in 2019…

...nah, just kidding. We wanted something playful, meaningful, unique, and morning-oriented. Inspiration struck one day – we listened – and The Dose Of News Useful Today was born.

It’s impossible to be completely impartial and unbiased when it comes to choosing content. That being said, we have several safeguards in place to ensure our selection is systematic – not subjective – and as close to impartial as possible.

🤫 Secret Time: There’s not that many newsworthy events occurring each day. The news industry’s economic incentive is to generate attention, which is done through stoking outrage with sensationalized and divisive headlines. As the volume of content scales up, so does the revenue.

Put Another Way: Have you seen The Social Dilemma? The premise is similar, except news content is served up by humans, not algorithms. (If you haven’t seen the documentary, this is your excuse to go sit on the couch and watch Netflix.😉)

Here’s the process allowing our team to cut through all the b.s.:

1. We have a system that scours 100+ publications and various social media sources to extract the most discussed and influential topics of the day.
2. We aggregate these topics in a centralized place, after which our content team begins their daily debate to determine the stories that make the cut. Our team ranges from progressive to conservative, and we have intense, rational, civil, and logical discussions to ensure there’s a topic consensus before moving forward with writing the stories. We practice what we preach!
3. Once the topic selections are finalized, our journalists write their respective stories. There is a strong emphasis on factual reporting, and our content team pulls directly from primary source documents, if possible. When primary sources are NOT available, our team cross-references 4+ sources to look for "intersection points." Intersection points occur when news outlets with different biases (i.e, MSNBC/CNN & Fox News) include the same information in their coverage of a particular topic or event. The intersection points are incorporated into our reporting.
4. We also place an emphasis on the informed perspectives of multiple insiders. Our team maintains a database of contacts ranging from D.C. insiders to environmentalists to executives in the oil and gas industry, and we mine these contacts to help inform our coverage.
5. Once the stories are written, we have a 3-step editorial process in place for each piece of content to ensure our information is accurate and engaging.

This is Taken Directly from our Editorial Bible:

Everything We Create Should Be…

• Valuable, informative, fun, and interesting – why should anyone spend their precious time with our content?
• Human – a real, accessible person wrote this.
• Accurate and objectively verifiable.

Main Reporting:

• If Exclusive: The publication that originally broke the story.
• If Widely Reported & Political: Primary sources, first and foremost. If they’re not available, we choose sources rated neutral and highly factual according to MediaBiasFactCheck.com.
• If Widely Reported & Non-Political: Specialty reporting. For example, if it’s an entertainment story we’ll look for articles in Variety, Deadline, Hollywood Reporter, etc. If it’s a sports story, we’ll look at ESPN, Bleacher Report, The Athletic, etc. If there’s a story that takes place in Phoenix, we’ll link to one of the Phoenix area’s local news websites. So on and so forth.

Curated Op-Eds:

• We strive to include arguments that are the most poignant, persuasive, and well-articulated to provide a strong, clear 360º view of a topic.

We believe quality information about the world around us is a human right. More and more news publications are switching from an ad-supported model to a subscription model, charging consumers a monthly fee for access to quality information.

Sounds fine in theory, right? But only 1 in 5 US adults pay for news.

The idea of more and more info moving behind paywalls makes us a little apprehensive. Information is power, and it should be easily accessible to everyone – not just those willing to pay or who can afford it.

So to answer the question: We have to support our operations somehow, and we’d rather live in a world where accurate, quality information highlighting multiple perspectives is freely available to anyone who seeks it.

+Shameless Plug: If you’d like to support what we do, please show our sponsors some love when you see a brand that catches your eye. You can also help support our operations by purchasing some of our buttery soft merch.

Not at all – we designed it to be the opposite.

Most people associate ad-supported news publications with traffic-based, programmatic advertising. Think: a webpage that jumps all over the place while ads load, intrusive autoplay videos, sensationalist headlines stoking outrage.

That’s NOT the DONUT. Full stop.

Human beings are incentive-driven creatures. Companies are the same way.

• A traffic-obsessed publication’s incentive (aka not us): Drive traffic to each story. In other words – the more eyeballs it attracts, the more money the company makes. Traffic is generated through outrage and sensationalized headlines.
• The DONUT’s incentive: Create habitual readers by consistently delivering on our value prop. We’ve positioned ourselves as the fun antithesis of bias/misinformation, sensationalism, and outrage. The more habitual readers we create, the more our revenue grows.

What happens if we fail to live up to our mission? People unsubscribe, word gets out, and we cease to exist.

Serving you has always – and will always – come first.

We only share self-reported, aggregate information about our list with potential sponsors to help them identify whether the DONUT is a good place to spread their message. We capture this information with an annual subscriber survey.

Once a campaign is complete, we share:

• Open rates (percentage of the list who opened the email)
• Total number of inbox impressions (the total # of times the email was opened)
• Total unique clicks on the sponsor’s links
• Total number of clicks on the sponsor’s links

All of this information is in the aggregate, meaning at no point throughout this process does a sponsor gain access to ANY personal information about you unless you visit their website and provide it yourself.