Announcing The Front Page

Breaking Out of the Echo Chamber, One Headline at a Time

Earlier this month I launched Behind Every Them — a project built on a simple premise: What if the “other” was just you, somewhere else? (read that article here)

The idea was to humanize the faceless “them” we hear about in headlines. To show that a family in Lagos worries about the same things you do. That a parent in São Paulo has the same hopes for their kids. That we’re all just people, living parallel lives in different zip codes.

Today I’m announcing the next chapter of that same mission.

Introducing The Front Page — a simple, free, global news site that shows you the top headlines from 60+ countries, every day, from credible sources worldwide.

Why This Matters Now

We live in an age of algorithmic echo chambers.

Your feed shows you what you’ve already clicked on. Your news is filtered through what keeps you engaged — which usually means what confirms what you already believe or outrages you about “them.”

The result? We know less about the world than we did 20 years ago, despite having more information at our fingertips than any generation in history.

I wanted to build something different:

• No algorithm. Just the top stories from each country, ranked by newsworthiness.
• Credible sources only. Wire services, papers of record, public broadcasters — the same sources journalists trust.
• The whole world, not just your corner of it. What’s the headline in Kenya today? In Poland? In Indonesia?

Because when you see what matters to people in other countries — what they’re celebrating, what they’re worried about, what they’re debating — something shifts. They stop being “them” and start being people.

The AI-Enabled Builder Era

Here’s the part that still amazes me:

This entire project — architecture, code, design, deployment pipeline — was built in a single conversation with AI.

Not weeks. Not months. One conversation.

A few years ago, building something like this would have required:

• A backend engineer/skills to set up RSS fetching and data pipelines
• A frontend developer for the UI
• A designer for the editorial aesthetic
• DevOps/skills to configure GitHub Actions and deployment
• Day(s) of Stack Overflow debugging

Today? I described what I wanted to build, and Claude helped me architect the system, write the fetcher, design a headline ranking algorithm, generate the static site, and create an editorial parchment design that feels like a newspaper masthead.

We are living through a fundamental shift. AI is turning ideas into implementations at a pace we’ve never seen.

The barrier to building is collapsing. The people with ideas — but without engineering teams — can now ship. The solo person can build what used to require a team.

I’m not an average frontend developer. I’m certainly not a designer. But I had an idea about making the world feel smaller and more connected, and now it exists at thefrontpage.world.

How It Works (Transparency Matters)

I want to be upfront about what’s happening under the hood.

The sources: The feed list builds on the excellent open-source work by Yavuz Selim, who curated RSS feeds from news sources across dozens of countries. I validated this list, focusing on credible outlets — wire services (Reuters, AP, AFP), public broadcasters (BBC, NHK, ABC Australia), and papers of record.

The ranking algorithm: With multiple sources per country, how do you pick the “top 3” headlines? We (Claude & I) built a weighted scoring system:

• Recency (30%) — Newer stories score higher, with exponential decay over 6 hours
• Source authority (20%) — Wire services rank above tabloids
• Importance signals (25%) — Keywords like “election,” “earthquake,” or “parliament” boost scores; clickbait patterns (“you won’t believe…”) get penalized
• Cross-source consensus (25%) — If 3+ outlets cover the same story, it’s probably important

The algorithm then de-duplicates similar headlines so you don’t see the same story three times from three sources.

Is it perfect? No. But it’s transparent and simple.

What’s Next

Headlines update every 30 minutes from 200+ RSS feeds across 60+ countries. It’s free. No login. No tracking. Just news from around the world.

My hope is simple: that someone scrolling through might pause on a headline from a country they’ve never thought about, and for a moment, realize that people everywhere are navigating the same uncertain world we all share.

That’s the thread connecting this to Behind Every Them. Different projects, same mission:

Shrink the distance between “us” and “them.”

Check it out: thefrontpage.world

And if you’re curious about the technical architecture or want to build something similar, drop a comment — happy to share how it works under the hood.

What headline from another country surprised you today?