Beehive is a project with a sole purpose: to make good quality content easily available to everyone, in a way that is sustainable to the industry. Beehive is also a community: our members are not just members but active collaborators, and share that purpose with us. As a news rating platform, Beehive is a platform to read and compare the latest news, top stories and trending topics from award-winning publishers in the UK & the world in just one place. It is a revolutionary way to think about the media, grouping news together by subject and offering unbiased ratings on each article based on trustworthiness, quality and depth. It is the only platform in the world to offer unbiased ratings at the article level.

Newspapers are made of a multitude of professionals and content creators – including reporters, columnists, researchers, editors and publishers. We don’t believe in simply labelling them and everything they publish. Even the most reputable newspapers may publish bad articles sometimes, and less renowned outlets may have good journalists doing a good job. Likewise, even if you feel more politically aligned with the left and wouldn’t typically read a right-wing newspaper, you may actually like specific articles aligned with the right – and vice versa. We want to give you access to the best journalism available, from all parts of the political spectrum, rewarding those who produce it and incentivising everyone to do better. We believe this is the only way to reverse the extreme polarisation our world is going through, and restore common ground for elevated debates. For that reason, using unique and unbiased algorithms, Artificial Intelligence and our Smart User Rating system, we have created the only platform out there where you can find article-level ratings.

Beehive combines publisher-level ratings from independent news monitoring organisations and research centres – such as All Sides, Media Bias Fact Check and the Pew Research Center – with an exclusive technology developed to assess each news article individually – and we are the only platform in the world doing that. Most ‘fake news’ out there isn’t really fake, but rather verifiable numbers taken out of context to make you feel particularly angry or saddened at something that hasn’t been explained well enough. To fight misinformation, Beehive’s AI-powered algorithms will favour for example news articles that provide facts and numbers within a context and cite sources, against those that are mostly made of emotionally-charged content. It won’t therefore tell you if something is true, but rather the quality of the content and the likelihood that you can trust what is in there. It will also favour articles that cover how, why and when things happened, and offer you different sides of a story to empower you to make your own conclusions. You can trust this algorithm will never be biased: it will favour contextualised facts against opinionated statements, no matter who or what they are meant to defend. Still not sure? Decide it for yourself: We give you the main reasons behind each of the thousands of daily ratings so you can make your own mind. And if this wasn’t enough, Beehive’s algorithm-driven ratings are also complemented by our Smart User Rating system.

We at Beehive have a ‘regenerative’ mindset, and believe the world is built around reciprocal relationships. The famous experimental cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who has taught at Harvard, Stanford and MIT, defends that we can only overcome our pre-wired confirmation bias and find rationality as a group. According to him, we are more rational collectively than any of us can be individually. For that reason, Beehive ratings combine its unique algorithm with the collective views of our users. But it goes beyond that – the more you read and the more informed you are, the more weight your ratings will have on our platform. We are also able to detect if any user tries to benefit or harm an article because it’s published by a specific newspaper or has a specific political alignment. This way, we give voice to those who deserve it and bring forward sharper viewpoints. We want anyone to be able to be part of our community and express their opinions, but we also believe that we need to do so with responsibility.

Our mission at Beehive is a big one. It costs money to create and maintain this project, and we want to remain completely independent from any corporations or affiliations. We believe the minimal contribution fee of 99 pence per month, less than one pound (and less than the average daily newspaper), is a fair ask to keep our engines running. If you choose to contribute, it will give you access to the only article-level rating platform in the world, thousands of daily ratings on articles with no paywalls and protection against all kinds of bias. But it also helps us reward those who produce good quality content. We know the journalism industry is suffering, and we want to offer a way to sponsor good journalism while creating media accountability. Our aim is to promote views and resources to those who manage to get high scores on their ratings, and to discourage misinformation. So when you join our community you don’t become just a reader, you become an active contributor of a world with better information.

Rest assured: All payments on Beehive are made, upon your choice, either through Apple’s payment engine (Apple Pay), Google’s payment engine, or through a global payment platform called BlueSnap, which has an A+ accreditation from the Better Business Bureau (BBB). None of your payment information is seen, collected or stored by Beehive.

You. And all other members. By choosing to contribute with as little as 99 pence a month, Beehive members fund the community and maintain its unrestricted independence from corporations and political parties. Members can also contribute with the actual ratings through the Smart User Rating system (see above). But who started all of that? Beehive is a project idealised by many people dreaming of a world in which story telling is not used as a tool to control and influence people, but rather to discuss ideas, expand knowledge and build a fairer society. Many people were part of this project, including strategy consultants, independent journalists, software engineers, lawyers and philanthropists, from all parts of the political spectrum – and many as volunteers. None of them are linked or acting on behalf of any corporations, media conglomerates or affiliations. More importantly, none of them have any influence on news assessments, which are entirely done by objective algorithms and Smart User Ratings. If you want to know more, send us a message at info@beehive.news, we usually reply within 24 hours.

Beehive promotes newspapers and articles from all parts of the political spectrum. Our only commitment is to good quality content, and we believe any opinion is valid as long as it’s responsible, well-written and backed by data. We can only grow if we learn how to embrace challenge and disagreement, and therefore disagreement sits at the core of our ethos. We want to promote elevated debate. None of the ratings are done by us, but rather by objective algorithms and a Smart User Rating system. We also monitor the political views of our users and how they interact with the content they find through the platform, to make sure we maintain a balanced and unbiased environment.

We believe good newspapers may sometimes write bad articles and bad newspapers may sometimes write good articles – hence the absolute importance of article-level ratings. But we also believe that some newspapers have a more serious institutional commitment to factuality than others. For this reason, we monitor the performance of different newspapers with renowned independent fact checkers such as Media Bias Fact Check, Check Your Fact, and Poynter to determine which ones we want or don’t want to promote. Once in the app, we also monitor the performance of their stories, and newspapers that constantly receive bad scores risk being removed from the platform. We would like good-quality information to be easily accessible and democratic, so we only promote newspapers that offer at least a number of their articles to readers without charge – reducing the amount of paywalls you might find. Currently, we provide ratings for important UK- and US-based newspapers such as the BBC, the Independent, the Guardian, SkyNews, the Washington Post. To escape regional bias, we also rate Al Jazeera, directly covering the Middle East, Haaretz, from Israel, the Hindu, from India, and the Sixth Tone, an independent newspaper from China. And to fulfill our ongoing mission of giving a voice to great independent and mission-driven writers, we also partner with Perspectives, from the University of Warwick, and Bath Magazine, from the University of Bath. We are just getting started, and currently working on adding other sources to the platform. If you are you missing any specific newspapers from Beehive, write us at info@beehive.news, or leave your feedback through the feedback feature of our app.