Imagine building a business where people assume what your product stands for, and even who it agrees with, before they’ve seen it or before you’ve even launched it.
Welcome to my life.
If you want to convince people of your good faith and your intellectual honesty, you have to demonstrate that you say what you mean and mean what you say. One of the easiest ways to do that is to produce a product that’s very obviously not biased, so people can see for themselves you’re doing the right things.
From the earliest days workshopping the concept that became Hedgehog, I knew we needed a core feature that presented news in an unbiased, factual, robust — but still interesting — way. Headlines with a little kick to them, but unbiased just the same.
Why? Because trustworthy, factual news is more important than ever before. Been online lately and seen some of the AI fakes going around? Read any fabricated stories from slick-looking click farms? What about social media incentivizing factually misleading but emotional viral content?
We need news, and we need to be able to trust the places we’re getting the news. They go hand in hand. So we spend a ton of time thinking about bias, and how to fight it and build something people can respect.
Journalists and the media industry also have to earn back and continue to build that trust, especially with so many people out there attacking their credibility directly. We hope to give them the tools to do their job as well.
This is a good spot to pass the mic, as it were, to our chief editor, who recently had something to say about this on Hedgehog:
We mean this stuff when we say it. Fighting bias by supporting journalism is at the core of what we’re doing every day.
People will make assumptions. We’ll prove them wrong.
