About
We have been publishing nothing in particular since 2015.
NeutralFeed began as an internal tool at a hospital trust whose waiting-room screens kept showing rolling news to people who had just received it. Eleven staff, one corpus, no investors, and a growth rate we describe internally as adequate.
Photograph: Olevy · CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The neutrality standard
We publish the rules we edit against, in full, and we are bound by them in public. The short version is four clauses.
- No people. An item may not turn on the actions, statements or character of a named living person. Attribution of a historical invention is permitted; attribution of a motive is not.
- No forecasts. We describe how things are classified and measured. We do not say what will happen, because a prediction acquires stakes the moment it is read.
- No comparison of jurisdictions. We will publish the width of a shipping container. We will not publish which country's containers are better.
- Three sources. Independent, citable, and returned with the item. An item on one source stays in review for as long as that remains true.
The standard is versioned, and changes to it go through the same three-source review as an item does. It is currently at 4.2, last amended in 2024 to clarify that a manufacturer's own specification counts as one source and not two.
Corrections
Nine, in eleven years. All of them are here permanently.
| Date | Item | Correction |
|---|---|---|
| 2016-04-11 | met_0031 | Cloud genus spelled altocummulus since launch. Corrected to altocumulus. |
| 2017-09-02 | obj_0104 | Traffic cone patent given as 1940. The application is 1943. |
| 2018-01-30 | inf_0788 | Lock chamber length quoted in feet under a metric locale. |
| 2019-06-17 | trn_0455 | Route distance rounded to the nearest hundred kilometres without saying so. |
| 2020-11-05 | std_0212 | Tolerance stated as ± where the source states +/− asymmetrically. |
| 2021-03-22 | inf_1902 | Head of water converted at 1 bar per metre rather than per ten metres. |
| 2022-08-14 | obj_0530 | Pallet board count correct, nail count transposed as 87. |
| 2023-05-09 | hor_0044 | Leap second total not updated after the 2016 insertion. |
| 2025-02-26 | met_0610 | Sea area named in an order that has not been used since 2002. |
What we will not do
We are asked for these regularly and the answer has not changed.
- A news channel. Several customers have asked for "just the uncontroversial headlines". There is no such thing, and the day we ship one is the day the rest of the corpus stops meaning anything.
- Sponsored items. An item that somebody paid to place has stakes by construction, whatever it says.
- Personalisation. The feed does not know who is looking at it and has no way to find out. On the screens we serve, there is usually more than one person looking anyway.
- Engagement metrics. We do not measure whether an item held attention. A product optimised for attention becomes, within about two quarters, a product with stakes.
Contact
Email reaches everybody: hello@neutralfeed.com. Enterprise and procurement: enterprise@neutralfeed.com. Corrections, which we take seriously and act on: corrections@neutralfeed.com.
We do not have a telephone number on this page, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight.
Put something on the screen that will still be true next year.
Ambient is free for one screen and one channel, and it does not expire. The key takes about a minute.