Frequently asked questions

Pano shows you how the left and the right cover the same story. We read 140+ news sources across the political spectrum, group their articles into stories, and for each one tell you what happened and how each side covered it. Stories that run for days are collected into storylines, so you can follow them over time.

Pano was started by Sam Laber, a longtime builder of mission-driven consumer products. Alongside him is a small team of media outsiders seeking to bring back context and transparency to our news.

Yes—Pano is completely free. Every story on the site and our daily newsletter are available to everyone, with no paywall and no subscription. The project is supported by reader donations.

Pano reads 140+ news sources across the political spectrum. This includes left-leaning sources like CNN, MS NOW, and The Atlantic; center sources like the Associated Press, ABC News, and CBS News; and right-leaning sources like Fox News, the New York Post, and The Daily Wire. We focus on outlets that cover U.S. news and politics. The Sources page lists every one, with its lean, its reliability, and how often it shows up in our stories.

Get in touch via our contact us page. We're quite responsive, and would love to hear from you!

Bias and reliability ratings are assigned to each news source using a composite of publicly available data from organizations like Ad Fontes, AllSides, and Media Bias / Fact Check. These organizations regularly review and update their assessments to provide accurate, up-to-date information on the sources we consume.

Our stories are written with AI, from real reporting. For each story, AI reads a sample of the articles from across the spectrum and writes two things: what happened, and how each side covered it. The facts in "What happened" come only from sources rated reliable enough to state them; the lowest-rated sources never contribute facts. "How each side covered it" describes how left- and right-leaning outlets framed the story and links to the articles it cites. We don't use AI to invent news or add opinions of its own: every story links to the articles behind it, so you can check them yourself.

They show who covered a story. On a story page, the long bar splits every article by the lean of its source: blue for left, gray for center, red for right, with the counts underneath. In lists and in the newsletter, a short bar sums that up: solid blue for Mostly Left, solid red for Mostly Right, gray for Balanced or Mostly Center, and half blue and half gray (or half gray and half red) when two sides carried the story together.

We classify each source as left, center, or right from its bias rating, then count a story's articles by side. When 60% or more come from one side, the story is Mostly Left, Mostly Right, or Mostly Center. When one side makes up 20% or less, the label names the other two: Left & Center, Center & Right, or Polarized when the center sat it out. Anything else is Balanced. Stories with fewer than 8 articles are called Balanced rather than given a two-side label, because a handful of articles isn't enough to call it.

We check for new coverage four times a day, around 7am, noon, 5pm, and 9pm ET, and stories on the site update as it comes in. The evening pass settles the day's stories, and the best of them go out in the next morning's newsletter.

Send us a note through the contact page and include the story's link. We read every message.

Log in and visit your Account page to turn the daily newsletter or product updates on or off. You can also unsubscribe with the link at the bottom of any newsletter.

To delete your account, login and visit your 'Account' page. A delete account button will be linked at the bottom.

Yes, Pano News is entirely independent. No news source or interest group can influence our stories or our source ratings in any way. What's more, the website and newsletter don't have any advertising. The Pano News project is funded entirely by reader donations.

Pano is supported entirely by you, our reader, through donations. We don't sell ads or your personal information, and we are not beholden to any political interest groups.

At the moment, we do not have any formal partnerships. At some point, we may work with like-minded independent organizations focused on media literacy and depolarization. Time will tell.