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Brand New Thoughts/Media Literacy
The B-Sides of the News: What Are We Missing While Everyone Covers the Same Story?
A story can be important and still crowd out twenty other important stories. The problem is not only misinformation. It is attention allocation.
By ElleJanelle|July 29, 2026|3 min read
Why Does Everybody Wake Up Talking About the Same Three Things?
Open five news sites during a major story and something strange happens.
Different logos.
Different anchors.
Different politics.
Often the same subject.
During a Brand New Thoughts live, ElleJanelle described wanting her Ellements Dashboard to surface the B-sides and C-sides of the news: stories that matter but are unlikely to become the dominant national conversation.
The point was not to avoid big stories.
It was to resist the assumption that attention and importance are the same thing.
The headline everybody is covering might be important. It is still not the only thing that happened.
Brand New Thoughts
News Has an Attention Budget
Every newsroom has finite space.
Every creator has finite time.
Every viewer has finite attention.
That means journalism is partly an allocation problem.
Which story gets the homepage?
Which one gets a push alert?
Which one gets a correspondent?
Which one becomes the thumbnail?
Those decisions are necessary. They are also powerful.
Once one story becomes dominant, other outlets face an incentive to cover it because audiences already recognize it. Creators react to the existing conversation because the conversation already exists.
The result can look like independent consensus while also being a feedback loop.
How attention feeds itself
A story gets attention because it is important.
Then it becomes more important to cover because it is getting attention.
Then people search it more because they keep seeing it.
Then platforms recommend more of it because people are engaging with it.
That does not make the story fake.
It changes the distribution of visibility.
This is one reason news literacy needs to ask not only is this true? but also what is absent?
The audience is exhausted too
The Reuters Institute's Digital News Reports have documented growing news avoidance and fatigue across many markets. Its 2026 report describes responses that include anxiety, disengagement and cynicism alongside openness to new sources and formats. Read the 2026 Digital News Report overview.
That creates another incentive problem.
If audiences feel overwhelmed, news organizations may concentrate even more heavily on stories already proven to capture attention.
The strange result is that an information environment containing more journalism can still feel narrow.
A B-Side Is Not Necessarily a "Positive" Story
There is a common misunderstanding of alternative-news projects.
Finding overlooked stories does not mean searching for uplifting content to balance upsetting content.
The B-side might be worse.
It might be a city budget decision, a court ruling, a labor action, a foreign election, a new technology standard, a local environmental problem or a piece of legislation nobody has turned into a culture-war symbol yet.
The defining feature is not mood.
It is attention relative to consequence.
The Dashboard Experiment
ElleJanelle's response was technological.
Instead of relying entirely on whatever happened to reach her social feeds, she built a dashboard designed to pull from categories she wanted represented deliberately: international news, politics, technology, culture, philosophy, local stories and hyperlocal information.
That does not eliminate bias.
It changes where the bias enters.
A custom briefing still reflects source selection, prompts, categories and ranking decisions.
But those choices can at least become visible enough to inspect.
Build an information portfolio
A useful way to think about news consumption is like diversification.
If every source in your information portfolio reacts to the same trending list, you may have multiple outlets but only one agenda.
A more resilient mix might include:
- a major national newsroom;
- an international source;
- a local newsroom;
- a specialist publication in your field;
- primary documents when possible;
- people with different ideological assumptions;
- one source specifically chosen because it covers things the others routinely ignore.
The goal is not maximum volume.
It is reducing blind spots.
The Question to Ask After the Headline
When one story dominates the day, ask:
What had to disappear from my attention for this story to occupy this much of it?
That question will not always reveal a conspiracy.
Usually it will reveal something more ordinary and more useful: editorial incentives, limited resources, audience demand and platform dynamics.
The B-sides are what remain when we remember the news agenda is a selection.
Not the world itself.
Watch the episode
What story is everybody missing?
Add to the DiscussionWhat issue do you think matters more than the amount of attention it currently receives?