Sourced has been born.

Hi! Welcome to Sourced. I'm a writer here, and the host of the project, Christian Brasch.

We're launching Sourced today, a small news and opinion project built by two brothers from Eastern North Carolina who like writing more than we like watching stories get flattened into headlines.

Here's the honest version of why this exists. We kept noticing the same thing over and over, the same event covered five different ways by five different outlets, each one telling you what to think before you've even finished reading the first paragraph. Headlines are more focused on clicks instead of overall clarity, their overall context gets cut for length. And somewhere in the mix of all of that, the actual story, the one that happened, not the one that performs best, gets completely lost. We wanted a place where we could slow that down. Look at a story, look at how it's being told, and say what we actually think without a business model, editorial board or social media platform shaping the answer for us.

So that's the plan. Sourced isn't going to try to cover everything, and we're not interested in pretending we can. We're only two people as of the time this is released, and not a newsroom. We're not a wire service and we're not pretending to be neutral robots either, as we have opinions and we're going to write them, but we're also not going to blur the line between reporting and opinion just because it's easier. What we are going to do is pay attention, especially as to how national stories get shaped differently depending on who's telling them, and try to cut through that noise instead of adding to it.

Some posts here will be straightforward coverage, just what happened and the context around it. Some will be us pulling apart how a story is being framed across different outlets, side by side, so you can see the gap yourself instead of taking our word for it. Some will just be opinion, and clearly labeled as such, because we think readers deserve to know which is which before they start reading, not halfway through or at the end of it.

This whole website runs on Ghost, an open-source platform we're self-hosting ourselves, giving us total control over it without the restrictions of outside censorship. That means there's no algorithm sitting between you and what we write, no ads deciding what gets prioritized on the page, and no third party with a say in what we publish. It's just us, running our own server, writing what we think is worth writing.

We're still figuring out our voice. That's part of the deal with starting something new, you don't get it exactly right on day one, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. But we're glad you're here for it, and if you've got a tip, a correction, or just want to say hey, you can reach us at [email protected].