About

Seven Lights is an independent news site. Each day it publishes a short factual summary of the stories that multiple established news organizations are reporting, with links to that reporting.

There is no advertising on this site: no display ads, no sponsored posts, no affiliate links, no paid placement. There is no opinion, analysis, commentary, or editorial. It is just news, and the reporting it links to is the news itself.

How a story gets published

A story appears here only when all of the following are true:

• At least three separate articles report it.
• Those articles come from at least three different media companies. Two outlets owned by the same company count as one source, not two.
• The reporting contains enough concrete detail — who, what, when, where — for a summary to be written without filling gaps.
• A photograph supplied by one of the publishers is available and usable. A story with no usable publisher photograph is not published, even if the story is important.
• It is not a repeat of a story already published here in the previous three days.

Stories are gathered by software that reads public RSS feeds from news organizations, groups the articles that cover the same event, removes duplicate coverage from the same company, and ranks what is left. The ranking is based on how widely a story is being covered, not on preference for a topic or a side. Summaries are written from the material in the linked articles. Nothing is added that the sources do not report: no extra facts, no quotations that do not appear in the sources, no predictions, no general commentary about what a development might mean.

Checking the work

Every claim in a summary is attributed to the organization that reported it, and every story links to the original articles so a reader can compare the summary against the reporting. Photographs are the publishers’ own images and are credited to the publisher that supplied them.

When a story changes in a material way — a court ruling, a charge filed or dropped, an agreement signed, a death, a corrected figure — the same page is updated and a dated note on that page states what changed and when. The web address of a story does not change when it is updated.

On bias

No site can certify its own neutrality, so this page states the controls a reader can check instead.

A story has to be reported by three unrelated media organizations before it runs, which makes it harder for one outlet’s framing to become this site’s framing. Selection follows what multiple organizations are covering, not whether the coverage helps or hurts any political side, and that rule is applied the same way every day. Summaries carry the sources’ facts in plain language and avoid evaluative words. When sources disagree on a detail, each version is attributed to the organization that reported it rather than merged into a single claim. And every item links out, so a reader who suspects a summary has left something out can go to the source and see.

If a summary states something the linked sources do not support, that is an error, and it is corrected on the page under the update-note rule above.