Chad Kaul
Founder · Editorial Director · Methodology Architect
In 2007 I co-founded The Arena, a citizen-engagement product built on a simple conviction: being an informed citizen shouldn't be this hard. We designed for sustained civic engagement instead of clicks — average session time was about 25 minutes, on par with Facebook at the time. Then the 2008 financial crisis dried up venture funding. Our runway ran out before we could sustain our revenue — and that's on the founders.
I spent the years since applying startup operational design to other people's ventures — more than 110 of them, alongside teams from Google Ventures, Sequoia, Y Combinator, Techstars, and the Thiel Foundation — while watching the problem I'd set out to solve get worse every year. Journalists kept doing great reporting. Partisans kept hijacking it. Citizens kept receiving pre-packaged opinions instead of information.
I'm not a coder, and a daily news product at the discipline I envisioned required editorial and engineering scale I couldn't assemble or fund. AI finally closed that gap: a non-coding designer can now build, ship, and operate a daily news operation solo. So I went back to the work I started in 2007.
Signal Media is the second attempt. Our first publication, The Unspun News for American Citizens, is a daily brief produced under Citizen Signal — a named, version-stamped editorial methodology that fact-checks every claim across the political spectrum, shows every side's framing beside the documented record, and discloses its own bias risk on every edition. The written methodology now runs to over 100,000 words — and it keeps growing; the latest addition is a Spin Index that rates how spun each story's coverage is everywhere else. The brief informs; the reader editorializes.
I call the larger project renovating the Fourth Estate — not replacing journalism, but surfacing it neutrally so citizens can decide for themselves. The daily brief is the first step.
One designer and an AI — the honest version
Most of what you read online is made either by people pretending a machine wasn't involved, or by a machine with no one accountable behind it. The Unspun News is neither. It's built by one person — me — and produced with an AI model (Claude, by Anthropic), and I'll tell you exactly how the work divides.
I design the methodology and hold final editorial authority: what the brief is, how stories are scored, what counts as fair framing, where the standards sit. The AI is the production operator — it researches across the spectrum, drafts each story under the methodology, and runs the fact-check and bias scans at a cadence, every day of the year, that no solo human could hold with consistent discipline. Then a human closes the loop. Nothing publishes until I review it and click publish. The AI proposes; I decide.
That's why every edition's byline credits both — Designed by Chad Kaul · Voice: The Republic Desk (Citizen Signal + Claude Opus 4.8). Two co-equal inputs; neither alone produces the brief, and we hide neither. Disclosing how it's made — including the AI, including the one directional lean in our source cluster — is the whole point. A publication that asks for your trust should show its work.
Read it, then decide
That's the offer: every side, the documented record, a disclosed method — and your own judgment left where it belongs, with you.
If you're working on civic media, AI products, or the trust problem in news, I'd like to hear from you.