FrameDial News

Overview

FrameDial is a daily briefing for people who want to understand the news without being told what to think. Each morning it delivers up to 18 stories across 6 categories — U.S. Politics, World Affairs, Business & Economy, Tech & Society, Science & Environment, Rights & Justice — built through a fully automated pipeline: events are scored for relevance, deduplicated, and assembled into cited consensus facts, then read through two contrasting value lenses.

The main web experience is Quick Read: a per-story card with a 30-second Left framing, a 30-second Right framing, and a facts-only center. Each card also offers a 2-minute or 5-minute depth tier. The interactive dial on individual story pages lets readers slide between Frame A, facts-only, and Frame B at their own pace. Every factual claim cites at least one source.

Beyond the daily brief, FrameDial has two standalone tools. /reframe lets you paste any article URL and get a full seven-frame analysis with an interactive dial and shareable results — in about 60 seconds. The Values Quiz maps your own perspective across five real news scenarios into a named Lens Profile. A Field Guide catalogs 13 recurring patterns in news coverage — readers can see which patterns appear in today's stories.

Why we built it

Generic news feeds and keyword alerts are noisy and don't explain implications. FrameDial is built to deliver signal over noise: fewer alerts, deduplicated coverage, and fast, role-aware interpretation with receipts. The dial gives readers agency over how much opinion they consume without sacrificing the underlying facts.

How it works

1. Ingest — Events pulled from newsapi.ai with keyword pre-filtering and LLM relevance scoring, balanced across 6 categories (12 stories total) 2. Generate — Per story: screen all 9 value-frames for relevance, pick the best contrasting pair, generate consensus facts with src-N citations, then generate moderate + max content per selected frame 3. Email — Compose HTML + plain text digest and send via SendGrid to subscribers 4. Read — Browse the web app, use the dial to control commentary intensity, swap frames, tap citations to verify claims

Feature highlights

• Interactive Dial — Smooth slider across five content zones: Frame A, moderate Frame A, facts-only center, moderate Frame B, Frame B
• Cited Consensus Facts — Every factual claim references at least one source; phantom citations stripped automatically
• 7 Value-Frames — Human Impact, Accountability, Freedom & Rights, Economic Stakes, Boundaries & Dignity, Order & Institutions, Belonging & Identity. Best contrasting pair selected per story; readers can swap via frame pills.
• 6 News Categories — U.S. Politics, World Affairs, Business & Economy, Tech & Society, Science & Environment, Rights & Justice
• Quick Read — Per-story Left/Facts/Right toggle with 30-second, 2-minute, and 5-minute depth tiers. Convergence and divergence lines synthesized above each card.
• Daily Email — Facts-only digest; two CTAs per story link to Quick Read and the full dial view
• /reframe — Paste any article URL for a full seven-frame analysis, cited prose rewrites, and a shareable result page with an interactive dial
• Values Quiz — Five-scenario quiz that maps your perspective to a named Lens Profile; quiz-aware email signup
• Field Guide — Catalog of 13 named recurring patterns in news coverage; today's matching stories surface daily

Notes

• Tech Stack: Next.js 16, TypeScript, React 19, Tailwind CSS v4, Neon Postgres + Drizzle ORM, Supabase Auth (magic-link + Google/Apple OAuth), OpenAI (gpt-5.5 for gating, gpt-5.4 for writing/judgment, gpt-5.4-nano for utility), newsapi.ai, SendGrid, Vitest
• Pipeline: Fully automated daily cron at 4 AM ET via Render; retry logic for API failures, skip-and-continue for individual story failures, never sends broken or empty emails
• For Whom: Anyone tired of spin — news readers who want to verify claims, compare perspectives, and control how much commentary they consume