yews.news - The Mysterious News Outlet of Kanye West

YEWS appeared on December 12th, 2023 amidst Ye's announcements of his upcoming musical project Vultures.

The website seems to be a news aggregator. On the homepage you can see the date, a time, and ten bulletins which can each be expanded:

When expanded, a title, an image from the artist William Blake, and a somewhat brief summery of the linked news article can be seen:

And at the beggining that was it! No explanation, no announcement, no nothing. Just a nondescript website that appeared.

A development came two days after the first release when the bulletin A Note To Our Readers was posted on the site. (This has been the only address to the audience to date). Written in response to the blacklisting of yews.news by instagram, the note gives insight into the news aggregator's operation. Stating that the site is "Curated by Ye", it also includes mentions of an "editorial board" and "reporter[s] in the Yewsroom".

The note also gives two statements of its purpose:

• "YEWS distills domestic and international headlines into three simple, sane, and serene memos per day."

• "YEWS was created to simplify the news."

The site has strictly followed the pattern of publishing exactly ten bullitins three times a day (weekends included) at 10am, 3pm, and 8pm Pacific time.

At the time of this writing, 2,110 bullitins have been published. I took the liberty of scraping the data from them. Here are the news sources that were used at least 20 times, along with how many times they were cited.

1. dailymail.co.uk - 174,
2. nypost.com - 130,
3. archive.is - 102,
4. businessinsider.com - 73
5. twitter.com - 69,
6. cnn.com - 59,
7. theguardian.com - 58,
8. studyfinds.org - 53,
9. themessenger.com - 53,
10. axios.com - 50,
11. futurism.com - 45,
12. bbc.com - 41,
13. apnews.com - 40,
14. theverge.com - 31,
15. cnbc.com - 29,
16. zerohedge.com - 29,
17. complex.com - 28,
18. nbcnews.com - 25,
19. reuters.com - 24,
20. thehill.com - 24,
21. usatoday.com - 22,
22. variety.com - 22,
23. the-sun.com - 21,
24. news.yahoo.com - 20,
25. dezeen.com - 20,
26. foxnews.com - 20

A lot of questions remain for this website, but I think getting most of the basic facts gathered into one place will allow for the most accurate speculation.

P.S. - The 8pm publication on January 2nd, 2024 mentions nostr (but not in the way you might expect 😉).