www.fourstory.news
To ensure relevance, I engineered a complex scoring algorithm—iterated through natural language prompts—that weighs user behavior, declared interests, and negative filtering. A key technical breakthrough was the "Geographic Context Scoring" engine, which I designed conceptually to penalize "false positives" (e.g., differentiating Encino, CA from Encino, OH) and directed the AI to implement logically.
Fourstory.news stands as a resilient, highly personalized web application. It features a secure, bot-resistant user management system and a self-healing database architecture. The result is a "smart" daily reader that learns from user interaction but remains resilient to data shortages, seamlessly switching between API and RSS sources to guarantee a complete briefing every morning.
Result
Process
I architected Fourstory as an antidote to the infinite feed. As the sole Creative Director with no modern coding background, I utilized AI as a force multiplier to bridge the gap between my design vision and technical execution. I crafted the end-to-end brand experience and UI—focusing on typographic clarity and minimalism—and then guided AI agents to build the robust Python/Flask infrastructure to match that vision, proving that clear design intent can drive complex engineering.
Approach
Challenge
Modern news consumption is defined by "doom-scrolling" and algorithmic echo chambers. Users are flooded with endless content, often missing critical local updates because they are buried under engagement-bait. The challenge was to build a system that respects the user's time, providing a definitive "finish line" for their daily news consumption while solving the complex technical problem of sourcing accurate hyper-local news.
Fourstory
A personalized news platform designed to combat information overload by delivering a finite, curated daily briefing of exactly four stories: World, National, Regional, and Local.
