The Local Loop is an independent news aggregation site. We track dozens of established news sources — local, national, and international — and bring together the stories they are covering in one place, with a special focus on local news for the Phoenix, Arizona area.
How our stories are made
Each story on this site is a summary of reporting published by multiple independent news organizations. We use automated tools, including AI assistance, to identify when several outlets are covering the same event and to draft a neutral overview of what they report. Every story links to all of its original sources, and we encourage readers to click through and read the original reporting.
We only publish a story when at least two independent sources are covering it, and our summaries aim to be neutral: where sources disagree on facts or framing, we describe the disagreement rather than picking a side.
How coverage spread works
At the top of every story we show a coverage spread — how many independent sources we synthesized and how they break down by political lean, with a small colored bar. It makes our core promise visible: you can see the range of coverage a story drew from before you read a word of it.
The lean ratings come from third-party media-rating organizations — AllSides and Media Bias/Fact Check — not from us. Each source falls into one of five buckets:
- Left, Center, or Right — where the outlet’s news coverage sits on the US left–right spectrum. “Center” means the raters place it in the middle; it is not a claim that the outlet is unbiased or more accurate, and any individual story can still be framed with a slant.
- International — outlets whose primary audience is outside the US (such as the BBC, Deutsche Welle, France 24, and Al Jazeera). The US left–right axis doesn’t map cleanly onto them, so we mark them international rather than force a label.
- Unrated — outlets we don’t yet have a third-party rating for, including most local outlets. We show them honestly as unrated rather than guess.
The rating describes an outlet’s newsroom, not a single article. The full list of outlets and their ratings is on our Sources We Use page.
What we are not
We are not an original-reporting newsroom, and we don’t claim to be. The journalists at the outlets we link to do the reporting; our job is to help you see, at a glance, what is being covered and by whom.
Corrections
If you spot an error in one of our summaries, please email robert.nickels26@gmail.com and we will review and correct it promptly.
Photography
For stories centered on a specific public figure, place, or organization, we use a freely licensed photograph of that subject from Wikimedia Commons, credited with its author and license on the story. For general topics without a single named subject, we use illustrative stock photography from Unsplash, credited to its photographer; these depict the general subject matter of a story rather than the specific event described.