The Newsroom

Since early 2019, massive pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong have challenged China's grip on the prosperous island nation.  Now, in the midst of a global pandemic which diverted international attention and put mass-demonstrations on hold, the situation remains unpredictable. Newspaper tycoon Jimmy Lai is arrested at his office on August 10th under Hong Kong's controversial new state security law.  Photo courtesy of the Associated Press. With a comprehensive timeline of events, we hope to shed some light on how the conflict in Hong Kong has developed recently, where the situation now stands, and where it may be headed next. May After gaining control over its domestic COVID-19 outbreaks, China sought to aggressively reassert itself abroad, starting in Hong Kong with the proposal of new, wide-reaching national security legislation.  When hundreds took to the streets on May 24th to protest the proposal, Police fired on them with tear gas.   Two days later on t

5 Months into a Pandemic An update to my March 6th post On March 6th of this year, I made my first medium post. It was in the early stages of the pandemic here in the United States and I felt the need to share my initial thoughts with the information available at that time. Unfortunately, the number of cases and deaths have exploded since then, and after a brief plateau, we are now experience a new surge in cases. As promised, I’d like to share my thought on what I think we can expect over the next few months, with a focus on economic and social trends. To start, it’s important to understand what brought us to where we are today. Using the interactive timeline provided by Newsphere , the snowball effect of the pandemic becomes quite clear. However, we appear to be at a crossroads. While some areas of the globe, like New Zealand and much of Europe, have at the moment “flattened the curve”, the United States has at best plateaued in terms of daily new cases. Economically, there has been

If you're particularly interested in Newsphere and the work going on behind the scenes, we welcome you to join us on Slack. We actively use Slack to solicit feedback and converse with users in a much more intimate way than what is possible via email. Our goal is to foster a strong community of individuals who care about the news and how it is delivered. We believe a great way to build this is via conversations and story telling. If you're interested in joining us, you can continue the conversation on Slack at the following link: https://join.slack.com/t/newspherecommunity/shared_invite/zt-dsce98hg-ZutLhjMB8kpmzfEK2lI3yg Hopefully we'll be chatting with some of you soon!

When you use Newsphere, is there anything you'd like changed? Any features that you feel like are missing? Please let us know. Our goal is to make an easy to use, informative site, and that means hearing from you, the users. Email us at alex@newsphere.org if there is anything you'd like to see changed. Considering the site is still in its early stages, we're anticipating quite a few things that need to be fixed, which is ok! Looking forward to hearing from y'all. - Brandon

Here at Newsphere, we are trying our best to improve how we all consume the news. The trend has already been for news consumption to shift from physical newspapers to online mediums. Yet, with that has come extensive sharing of fake or misleading articles, often on platforms like Facebook. This is especially relevant during elections, when the truth about candidates can often make or break their hopes of winning an election. We are hoping that as we continue to make iterations on our Newsphere website, we'll be able to provide contextualized stories that capture the range of events leading up to the specific story you're researching. We believe news headlines are only as good as the context that is provided for them, which is why we're really passionate about the timeline we've created. It was originally in a horizontal format, however we are currently testing it out as a vertical timeline. Any feedback on this would be greatly appreciated as we're still editing t

Coronavirus: The Great Unmasker CDC image of COVID-19 As of the time that I am writing this, there are over 100,000 cases and 3,500 deaths attributed to Coronavirus, also known as 2019-nCoV (officially known as SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19). Every day, the number of cases and deaths increases, with South Korea and Italy being the main hotbeds outside of China, and the United States appearing to be on the verge of a large outbreak with small clusters popping up from LA to New York. Rather than discussing the science behind the virus or the statistics behind it’s growth, areas that I’m no expert in, I’d prefer to take a look at the macro impacts of the virus on our daily life in both the short term and long term. Before I continue, I’d like to preface this by acknowledging that I am not a cultural anthropologist, biologist, professor, or industry leader by any means, but the purpose of me writing this is to lay out my observations as a 21 year-old college student in the midst of what feels lik