The aggravation you feel reading the news isn't accidental. Outrage and anxiety drive clicks, and clicks are what ad-supported media sells. Balm delivers the same factual information without the emotional manipulation.

Every weekday morning and afternoon, Balm reads coverage from roughly twenty outlets across the political spectrum — wire services, public media, left- and right-leaning papers, and official sources like the Federal Reserve and the CDC. Where several outlets cover the same event, Balm synthesises them: facts every source agrees on are reported plainly, and genuine disagreements are flagged as disagreements rather than settled. Loaded framing is stripped out. Every story links back to the outlets it came from, so you can check the original reporting yourself.

Balm is assembled by software, using Claude to do the rewriting, against a fixed set of editorial rules. Those rules are public and readable — if you want to know exactly how a story was rewritten, you can go and read the instructions that did it.

Some events are worth knowing about and painful to read. Those stories go in a section at the bottom of each edition, collapsed, so opening them is your choice rather than something that happens to you while scrolling.

Within that section, perpetrators of violence are never named and their methods, photographs, and manifestos are never described. Coverage that turns an attacker into a character is coverage that rewards the act. Balm reports what happened, to whom, and what it means — and stops there.

Balm is built and maintained by one person in Santa Cruz, California. It is independent: no advertising, no investors, no paywall, and no editorial agenda beyond the rules above.

For questions, feedback, story suggestions, or press inquiries:

contact@balm.news

You can also browse past editions.

Balm publishes an RSS feed, for anyone who uses a feed reader — an app that gathers new articles from the sites you follow into one place. To subscribe, copy this address and paste it into your reader:

https://balm.news/feed.xml

If you don't use a feed reader, you don't need one. Balm is a normal website — just visit whenever you like.

If Balm is useful to you, consider supporting it on Ko-fi.