WTF Just Happened Today is today's essential newsletter logging the daily shock and awe in national politics. Read in moderation.
The goal is to capture the most important news coming out of the D.C. in a digestable form inspired by The Skimm, Techmeme, and tweetstorms.
Like many, I found the 2016 election cycle to be deeply confusing and frustrating. I’m a news junkie, but struggled to keep up with all the articles, blogs, tweets, Facebook posts, newsletters, podcasts, and broadcast news segments – and still make sense of everything. I don’t see how any “normal” person with a job and/or family could actually make sense of things. They have a scarcity of time available to consume news, but the media environment is optimized for an abundance of news. I started WTFJHT as a personal project to log the biggest stories of the day so that I could keep track of what was going on. It was originally supposed to be more of a save-for-later checklist of articles to read when I got home from work, but quickly morphed into the current, daily compendium.
What started as a personal project – a challenge to chronicle the daily shock and awe of the administration's first 100 days – has become my full-time job. See? Trump IS creating jobs.
I try to approach the daily update like a front page editor at a newspaper would: focus on timeliness, impact, prominence, importance, conflict, and unexpectedness. This is further refined by framing WTFJHT’s scope of coverage to the curiouser and curiouser news from in and around the Trump and Biden administrations in particular – not politics in general. Together, WTFJHT serves as a single, daily summary of the most important events regarding the Trump and Biden administrations.
A note on bias: Humans making decisions about the relative importance of information is inherently biased. WTFJHT is the news through the lens of a person making those decisions. With every summary I write and article I cite, I’m make a news-value judgement. Journalism is a set of ethics based on trust, truthfulness, fairness, integrity, independence, and accountability.
With WTFJHT, you will find an independent voice that is personally accountable and considerate for how the editorial choices impact others. I go to great lengths to cite the original source of news and draw from a diversity of sources.
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-Matt Kiser
matt at whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday dot com