MetaCurrents

The need

Modern news consumption is shaped less by the underlying events than by which feed a reader happens to be in. The same story shows up with very different framing depending on whether it comes from a left-leaning publication, a right-leaning one, or a foreign desk. Most readers see one slice of any given story and rarely the others.

MetaCurrents flips that. The goal is to surface the same event through multiple framings side by side — not to declare any single source the truth, but to make it easy to see how the same facts get told differently and why that matters.

What it does

• Multi-perspective coverage — each story is contextualized with framings from across the political spectrum.
• Section coverage — geopolitics, business, technology, US politics, sports, and more.
• AI-driven aggregation and curation — an LLM pipeline pulls source material, identifies the same story across outlets, and produces neutral synthesis with attribution.
• Tag pages and structured indexes — readers can navigate by topic, region, or category rather than just by chronology.
• SEO and feed-friendly — full RSS, sitemap, and structured data so the site plays well with search and aggregators.

Tech stack

• JekyllStatic site generator. Each article is a markdown file under a custom _articles collection. Builds are deterministic and the entire site can be served from a CDN.
• GitHub PagesHosting + deploy pipeline. Push to main and the site rebuilds — no separate ops layer to maintain.
• AI content pipelineOff-site LLM workflow generates each article, with source attribution baked into the front matter. Output lands as plain markdown commits, so the entire history is auditable.
• jekyll-seo-tag, jekyll-feed, jekyll-sitemapSEO meta tags, RSS feed, and XML sitemap auto-generated at build time.
• Custom tag_pages.rb pluginGenerates a dedicated page for every tag in the corpus so topic-driven browsing has stable URLs.
• DM Serif Display + DM SansEditorial-feeling type system — serif headlines for the “newspaper” voice, clean sans for body.

What the design buys you

• Zero infrastructure — no database, no CMS server, no auth layer. The site is just compiled markdown served as HTML.
• Auditable corpus — every article exists as a markdown file in git, so changes, deletions, and corrections are all visible in the commit history.
• Cheap to scale — GitHub Pages handles the traffic; the only variable cost is the LLM inference for new articles.
• Decoupled pipeline — the content-generation side can be swapped (different models, different prompting strategies) without touching the publishing layer.

Status

MetaCurrents is live at metacurrents.com with active coverage. Source for the site lives on the aliencoded GitHub.

Links