Editor and Founder

My name is Jayden Jewett, the founder and chief editor of The Millipedia. I’m a young aspiring journalist in California who is determined to report the news accurately. Although I may not yet hold a degree in Journalism, I bring an unwavering commitment to finding and reporting the truth. It is my promise that I will always place facts before bias, source all of my claims, and never allow The Millipedia to become an echo chamber of misinformation.

My Mission

In today’s fast-paced world, many people don’t take the time to thoroughly research what they read. We read attractive headlines, skim the first few sentences of whatever article were reading, then hit the re-post button. I often would find myself and others repeating things that they thought was true but hadn’t 100% verified. This concerns me deeply, because how we perceive reality directly influences our decisions, our votes, and ultimately, people’s lives. These concerns inspired me to create The Millipedia. I did not create this website just to help inform others, but also to help me grow as a person. Whenever I talk to someone or comment something online I’ll think to myself “Is this truly accurate? Would I feel confident publishing this on The Millipedia?” I hope anyone who finds this news site gets as much value reading it as I have making it.

Fairness and Bias

One of the most important things to address when making a news site is the topic of bias. I feel like one of the main reasons people dislike modern media is because of this aforementioned “bias.” They will often say things like “we should not have republican/democrat news channels,” or “I miss the days when news outlets were unbiased and only reported the facts.” People have a certain nostalgia of this time when journalism was unbiased. However that mysterious time that people long for simply doesn’t exist. No matter how hard we try our biases appear in everything we do, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Biases are the sum of our thoughts and beliefs shaped by life experience. Having biases isn’t a bad thing, its basic human nature. Whats important is that despite our biases we maintain a sense of fairness. Fairness is different from bias. While bias represents our thoughts and beliefs on things, fairness is the way we analyze and report information. Our ability to be fair shapes how we interpret information, which shapes our biases. In order to have healthy biases we need to know how to be fair when gathering and reporting information. There are 3 main important standards I hold myself to in order to be fair when reporting news.

1. Get all sides of a story: You cant truly be fair until you hear all sides of a story. This doesn’t mean that all sides of a story are equally credible but it does mean that for story I cover I hear what each side has to say about each incident using multiple sources.
2. Treat everyone with the same standard: If a politician you disagree with does something bad and you call them out for it you should treat anyone who does the same thing the same way regardless of their political leanings. A person or news agency who treats different people with different standards displays huge red flags in their integrity.
3. Any bias should be grounded in fact: earlier I said that having biases is not a bad thing as long as those biases are healthy. However biases become unhealthy when they aren’t based in facts. People can derive different conclusions from the same facts just as long as they are indeed using facts.

Fairness and bias should act as a feedback loop. A healthy fairness leads to accurate information which should morph/change our biases to be more in line with the truth. This is how I intend to gather the information that I report and I believe its a much more satisfying answer then me pretending that I wont let any bias leak into The Millipedia.

Time Frame

I can’t make any promises as to how many papers Ill write for The Millipedia in a week, month, or year. At the time of writing, I’m the sole contributor to The Millipedia and I have many other responsibilities to take care of. Ill try to post as frequently as I can and make sure to cover important things that are happening but I always want to make sure that I favor quality over quantity but I don’t know what that quite looks like right now in terms of frequency of articles.

Funding

As of now The Millipedia is a free news site funded by my own pocket. In the future If I branched out into other social media sites like YouTube I may use the default YouTube ads, merchandise, or optional funding from sites like Patreon to fund The Millipedia. However that’s looking into the future. What I can tell you for sure is what I will not do. I will not accept sponsorships on any platforms as I believe that sponsorships can become conflicts of interest and want to feel free to cover stories about any person or brand. I will never put The Millipedia behind a paywall as I believe that Information should be free for all people. Finally in the extremely unlikely case that millionaires or billionaires take notice of me I will not take any large donations from the super wealthy. If I ever need money for The Millipedia I want it to be sourced by the common-folk at their discretion.