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The Decoder Ring

GetBriefed shows you more than a headline. Every mark on a story means something — here's the whole language, in plain words. Tap any symbol anywhere in the app to jump back here.

Trust & Sourcing

How much of the world stands behind a story — and where it went suspiciously quiet.

Source Strength Index
How many independent sources stand behind this story — high means well-covered.
A 0–100 score. The higher it climbs, the more outlets across more countries are carrying the story. It pairs a number with a band word (Thin, Solid, Strong…) so you never have to read colour alone.
A LOW score isn't a verdict that the story is weak — it's under-reported gold. Quiet stories are often the ones worth your attention.
Under-reported gold
This one matters — and almost nobody is carrying it. That's exactly why it's here.
We earn this badge for a story only when two things are true at once: our engine judges it genuinely newsworthy, AND a tiny handful of outlets are running it. A loud story everyone has isn't gold; a quiet story that deserves attention is. It's the whole point of GetBriefed — the version that matters, that you'd otherwise miss.
We only pin this once we're watching enough of the world to PROVE the silence is real — not just notice it. Until then the desk investigates quietly and the badge stays off. We'd rather say nothing than overclaim.
Source Gap Alert
The world went unexpectedly quiet on something it should be covering — and that silence is the story.
Once we're watching 500+ sources, we can spot a statistically odd hush: a region or topic that should be making noise and isn't. We flag the silence so you can ask why.
Needs a large enough source pool to be meaningful. Early on this is a presence/absence hint, not yet a statistical alarm.

Balance & the Audit

How we strip the spin: a spectrum you can read at a glance, and a trail you can open.

Bias Spectrum
A blue-to-red bar with a marker showing where the coverage leans — grey centre means de-spun.
The marker dot's position is where the weight of the *coverage* sits, blue (one lean) through a neutral grey centre to red (the other). The bar always carries a word as well as a position, so it reads without colour.
It maps the lean of the coverage we found — not a judgement of who's 'right'. We have no political allegiance.
The Auditing Models
Several different AIs touched this story — one summarised, the others checked it for bias.
We show small icons for the models involved, never their names. One model writes the summary; others independently audit it for lean and push it back toward a de-spun centre.
Icons only, on purpose. The point is that multiple independent minds checked the work — not which brand they came from.
Audit: Source Lean Found
A hollow mark means an auditor caught a lean in the original sources.
Open the audit trail and a hollow icon flags a step where a model detected slant in how the sources framed things — the raw material before we balanced it.
Audit: De-Spun Position
A gold mark means we reached the balanced, de-spun version you're reading.
In the audit trail, a gold icon marks the point where the auditing models agreed the story had been pulled back to a fair, straight reading.

Who It Touches

Not every story touches you the same way. These rings say who it actually reaches.

Impact: You
This one lands close to home — it touches you directly.
The first of four ascending impact rings. 'You' means there's a personal, in-your-life consequence to this story.
Impact: Community
This reaches your neighbourhood, town, or the people around you.
The second impact ring — consequences felt at the local, community scale.
Impact: Society
This shapes the country or society you live in.
The third impact ring — national or society-wide consequences.
Impact: Mankind
This matters to the whole species — the biggest scope there is.
The fourth and widest impact ring — consequences for humanity at large.

The Coverage Map

A map of attention itself. The faint places are where the real stories hide.

Coverage Heat Map
Dark countries are heavily covered; faint ones are under-reported — and that's where the gold is.
A world map shaded by how much coverage each place is getting. Drill from continents down to single countries. Shading always sits next to a count, so it reads without relying on colour.
It's the same data as the 25/75 balance — one source of truth. Faint isn't 'nothing happening', it's 'nobody's looking'.

You & Your Reading

How much a story mattered to you, and what you've already seen.

Your Rating
The Like button is a 1-to-10 dial, not a heart — tell us how much it mattered to you.
Rate any story from 1 to 10. It's about how much the piece mattered *to you*, and it quietly tunes what you see next.
Read State
Stories you've already seen go grey and fade — and they're kept in a searchable history.
Read a story and its card greys out so your eye skips it. Nothing is lost: everything you've read lives in the read-history panel, fully searchable.

Where Stories Live

Every story is routed, never discarded. These tell you which front door it came through.

Feed Labels
A tag for which feed a story is routed to — briefed, money, health, tech, science, green, gaming, culture.
Every story is multi-labelled to one or more feeds rather than forced into a single box. The label tells you which front door it's showing up in.
Sport is its own brand and never appears in the main feed — it's routed away, never thrown away.

Audio, Ads & Links

The honest plumbing — what's paid, what's an ad, and what you can tap into.

Audio Edition
Listen instead of read — the one paid feature, and the only place with no ads.
Tap the speaker to hear the briefing read aloud. Audio is the single paid upgrade (£1.99/mo) and it's completely ad-free.
Everything else stays free with ads. Audio is the one thing you pay to remove them from.
Advertising
Always labelled honestly as an ad — native in-feed, section dividers, or before audio.
Ads appear in the feed, as section dividers, and as a pre-roll before audio. They're interest-targeted, and they're always marked plainly as advertising.
Ads are on every tier and never disappear — that's how the free product stays free. We just never disguise them.

No symbol ships without an entry here. If you ever meet a mark you can't decode, that's a bug — tell us, and we'll fix it.