Newsline

Headlines from 17 news outlets across the political spectrum, with left/center/right bias tags and blindspot detection — stories covered by only one side. Free, unauthenticated, no rate limit.

Three ways in: a web reader, a JSON API, and an MCP server.

MCP

claude mcp add --transport http newsline https://news.heyitsmejosh.com/mcp

Tool	Params	Returns
get_news	view, outlet, bias, q, limit	Current headlines, flat or clustered by story
get_blindspots	limit	Only stories covered by a single political side

Stateless streamable HTTP, no auth. Works with any MCP client — Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor.

API

GET https://news.heyitsmejosh.com/api/stories — every parameter is optional.

Param	Values	Default
view	latest, stories, both	both
outlet	any outlet name, e.g. Hacker News	all
bias	left, center, right	all
blindspot	true	off
q	substring match on headline text	none
limit	1–200	60 clusters / 120 headlines

curl 'https://news.heyitsmejosh.com/api/stories?view=stories&blindspot=true'
curl 'https://news.heyitsmejosh.com/api/stories?view=latest&outlet=Hacker%20News&limit=10'

{
  "updated": 1754700000000,
  "stories": [
    {
      "title": "Fed holds rates steady",
      "blindspot": false,
      "sources": [
        { "title": "Fed holds rates steady", "link": "https://…", "outlet": "CNN", "bias": -1 },
        { "title": "Fed refuses to cut rates", "link": "https://…", "outlet": "Fox News", "bias": 2 }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "latest": [
    { "title": "Fed holds rates steady", "link": "https://…", "outlet": "CNN", "bias": -1, "ts": 1754699000000 }
  ]
}

CORS open to all origins. Feeds are re-pulled at most every 2 minutes; responses themselves are no-store (see below). ts is epoch ms, or 0 when the feed published no date (those sort to the bottom). Full spec: openapi.yaml · orientation for agents: llms.txt.

How it works

One Cloudflare Worker (worker.js) polls 17 RSS feeds and serves the page, the API, and MCP off a single cached pull:

• latest — flat reverse-chronological feed across all sources.
• stories — headlines clustered by title-keyword overlap, each source tagged left/center/right, one-sided clusters flagged blindspot.

Only the feed pull is cached, under a constant key. Filtering happens per-request in shape() downstream of it, and responses go out no-store — the zone's CDN cache ignores query strings, so caching them would serve one caller's ?outlet= to everyone. Nothing is refetched either way; only the cheap filtering runs again.

Clusters are filtered after clustering, and the flat feed before its 120-item cap. Both orderings matter: narrowing the input first would destroy the cross-outlet comparison, and filtering after the cap would hide low-volume outlets.

Bias scores

Each source carries a score from -2 (left) to +2 (right); 0 is center, or non-political for tech outlets like Hacker News and Daring Fireball. These are hand-assigned in FEEDS, not a third-party rating — treat them as a rough lean.

CBC · The Guardian · CNN · NPR · BBC · Global News · National Post · Fox News · NY Post · Daily Wire · Hacker News · Daring Fireball · NBC News · Wall Street Journal · NY Post Opinion · Vancouver Sun · The Province

Add one by appending [outlet, bias, url] to FEEDS at the top of worker.js. Any RSS 2.0 or Atom feed works.

Develop

npm test         # node test.mjs — parser, sort, cluster, shape filters
npm run deploy   # wrangler deploy

Cloudflare Workers + Workers Static Assets — one deploy serves the page, /api/stories, and /mcp.

Security: see SECURITY.md.

License

MIT 2026, Joshua Trommel. Headlines and links belong to their publishers — Newsline stores nothing and links out to the original article.