About This Was News

This Was News is a daily snapshot of what led the news — not today, but on days just behind us.

Each date gets its own page. For that day, a human editor looks at the top headlines on the home pages of a few major, fact-focused outlets (currently The New York Times, NPR, Associated Press, Center Square, and Washington Examiner). From those, we:

1. Pick one "lead" story for the day — the thing most likely to matter in a historical timeline.
2. Generate a short summary of that lead using the Kagi Summarizer, then edit it by hand for accuracy and clarity.
3. Show the other non-rejected top stories beneath it as a simple list, so you can see what else was on the front page of the world's attention.
4. Skip non-event content like live blogs, think pieces, "top 10" lists, reviews, explainers, and general lifestyle pieces. We focus on concrete events: elections, rulings, wars, treaties, disasters, major discoveries, big policy moves, and similar.

Why?

The idea behind all of this is simple: in early 2025, it started to feel like the news was erasing itself. Yesterday's "huge story" vanished under today's feed.

This Was News began as an idea for a social media bot on Bluesky and Mastodon that would post: "Here's what was news one week ago today…" That bot needed something solid to point to — a permanent, human-curated record of what actually led the news on each day. That record became this website.

In short, This Was News is a small, hand-curated antidote to the firehose: a way to remember what the world thought was important — even after the scroll has moved on.