The Red Folder is a project by Equality in Forensics, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization aiming to provide free programs and resources for underserved students pursuing Speech and Debate. It was founded as a current events news brief aimed at giving extempers and debaters a free, easily accessible way to read more.

Now, we offer weekly briefs of four international and four domestic stories, breaking news updates released throughout the week, and rare, high-quality special reports. Beyond general news briefs that serve Congress and Extemporaneous speaking, we also release breaking news and topic analyses (“debate briefs”) for Lincoln-Douglas, Policy, and Public Forum Debate!

We have a team of over 50 staff writers that work tirelessly to bring readers condensed current events information and top-notch analysis. Our staff writers include several national champions and major national circuit finalists in extemporaneous speaking and debate. If you’re interested in joining our national staff and becoming a reporter, please apply here.

Ethics Policy

Fairness: Our publications strive to be as fair as possible. This means straightforward honesty when conveying the facts of a story and the complete omission of misleading or deceiving information. All sides of the story will be presented in weekly briefs.

Opinion: Weekly briefs may have a writer’s own analysis, but all sides of the story will be presented and a writer’s analysis will be separated. Special reports provide extremely detailed information on a given topic, but may also include the writer(s)’ own professional take. For all controversial topics, the Red Folder will strive to objectively cover the facts and keep analysis and opinion separate. Breaking news updates will be entirely free of opinion. 

Evidence and Transparency

We are completely open about the sources we use. All publications contain direct links to the sources we pull our information from, and weekly briefs have a condensed citations section at the end for easy clicking. 

Reporters are expected to be accurate in their information. Not only will our sources and data be real, but they will be reported in the proper context and situation they originally appeared in. 

Updates

On our website, we keep a permanent archive of all weekly brief articles on the General Brief and Debate Brief pages — along with special reports, for easy and accessible reading. We keep breaking news updates up to 3 months back, with dates to mark their releases.

Social Media

The Red Folder manages our own separate Instagram (@redfoldernews). At the moment, we have no official social media accounts on other platforms. All content posted on our social media will follow the same guidelines as our other content. 

If you believe any of our standards have been violated, please email redfoldernews@gmail.com with your concerns. 

The Red Folder’s news platform is formally rated by Ad Fontes Media, a Colorado-based media watchdog and public benefit corporation known for its nationally recognized, nonpartisan Media Bias Chart that analyzes news sources for political bias and factual reliability.

With over 14,000 impressions a month and hundreds of regular readers, Red Folder articles are less biased than NBC News, Foreign Policy, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Foreign Affairs, ProPublica, and POLITICO. They are also generally rated more reliable than those of The Independent, The Atlantic, Newsweek, Fortune, Vox, and The Washington Post.