The Default Setting
Open any news app. The top stories are almost always the worst things that happened. A shooting. A crash. A fraud. An arrest. Algorithms learned long ago that fear gets clicks, outrage gets shares, and anxiety keeps people scrolling.
It works, by one measure. People do click. But a growing number are checking out entirely. Nearly four in ten people now say they actively avoid news because it makes them anxious or depressed. Not because they don’t care about their community, but because the way news is presented makes them feel worse for knowing it.
That’s a design problem, not a people problem.
A Different Feed
When we built Ktown News, we made a deliberate choice: the daily feed is designed to inform, not alarm.
That doesn’t mean we ignore reality. Safety incidents happen in Koreatown, as they do in every urban neighborhood. That data matters. But we route it to a separate layer - a safety dataset that informs other tools like the community map and safety resources. It doesn’t lead the daily feed.
The daily feed answers different questions. What opened? What’s being built? What changed? What’s coming? Who’s doing something for the neighborhood?
A new community program. A transit update. A business opening. A park being planned. A council meeting where residents can weigh in. These stories affect daily life in Koreatown more than most crime reports, but they rarely show up at the top of any news product because they don’t generate outrage.
What We Filter
Every story that enters our system is classified before it reaches the feed. We use five categories:
- Community - stories that inform residents about their neighborhood. These appear in the feed.
- Safety - crime and safety incidents. Routed to a separate dataset, not the public feed.
- Off-topic - K-pop lineups, Korean dramas, other Koreatowns in other cities. Not relevant to life in LA’s Koreatown.
- Evergreen - “ultimate guides” and listicles. Reference material, not news.
- Reject - real estate ads, celebrity gossip, spam.
The system catches concert announcements trying to pass as community news, apartment listings disguised as articles, and travel guides that mention Koreatown in passing. None of that helps someone living at 3rd and Normandie understand what’s happening around them.
The Tension
This involves a real trade-off. Some stories we filter are genuinely newsworthy by traditional standards. An arrest, a public safety warning - these matter. We’re not pretending they don’t exist.
But the feed serves a specific purpose: a place a resident checks to understand what’s happening in their neighborhood today. If every other story is about crime, people stop checking. When they stop checking, they miss the transit update, the community meeting, the new program that could actually help them.
People want to know what’s happening where they live. They just don’t want to feel worse for knowing it.
What Stays
What’s left when you remove the fear-driven stories is a feed that looks surprisingly different from what you’re used to. Development projects. Business openings. Community programs. Government decisions that affect your street. Cultural events. School programs.
It’s quieter. Less dramatic. But it’s also more useful. The kind of information that helps you decide whether to go to a meeting, take a different bus, check out a new resource, or simply understand why construction just started on your block.
News should leave you more informed, not more afraid. That’s the standard we’re holding ourselves to.