Methodology
From a Hebrew article on an Israeli newspaper's site to an English summary clustered against the rest of the coverage — here is the whole pipeline, and where it can go wrong.
1. Collecting the news
baba News continuously monitors roughly 30 Israeli outlets across four languages: Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, and the outlets’ own English editions. As outlets publish, we collect the new articles. We store metadata and the text needed to translate and summarize, and we always keep the link back to the original. The full list of outlets is on our sources page.
2. Translation
Each non-English article is translated into clear English by AI (large language models). The goal is a faithful, readable rendering of the original, not a word-for-word transliteration. Machine translation is strong but imperfect: it can mistranslate, soften or sharpen a claim, or lose nuance. Every article is labeled “Translated & summarized by baba” for this reason.
3. Summary and key points
From the article we generate a short English summary and a handful of key points so readers can grasp a story quickly. These are condensed by AI from the source text. They reflect what the source reported; they are not independent verification, and baba News does no original reporting of its own.
4. Entity extraction
We extract the people, organizations, and places a story is about, so related coverage can be connected and browsed by entity. Extraction is automated and occasionally mislabels or misses a name; corrections are welcome.
5. Clustering the same event
When several outlets cover the same event, we group their reports into a single cluster using semantic similarity — comparing the meaning of the stories rather than just matching keywords. Clustering is heuristic: it can occasionally merge two distinct stories or miss a related one.
6. The coverage bar
For a cluster, we show how the coverage breaks down across the political spectrum: a left/center/right bar built from baba’s own hand-assigned lean for each outlet in the cluster. Business and some community outlets are unrated and counted separately. When fewer than two politically rated outlets are present, we do not claim a skew. How lean is assigned is described in our editorial standards.
7. Linking out
Every story links back to the original article at its source. For outlets that publish their own English edition, we summarize and link out rather than republishing a full competing English body. baba News is a way into the Israeli press, not a replacement for it.
What this is and is not
This pipeline aggregates and translates other people’s journalism. It is not original reporting, and its AI steps can err. For anything that matters, read the linked original. If you spot a mistake at any stage, email news@itsbaba.com — see our corrections policy.