Johnny Selman is not a passive observer of the complex news cycle. Fifteen years ago, when I met him, he had begun BBCx365, conceiving and designing a post a day as visual commentary on a BBC headline. By the end of the year he had completed 365 of what became his entree to editorial commentary. His speedy cadence, as you would imagine, limited the output to a less-is-more visual language. Yet the resulting messages were often acute and insightful.
With the current news cycle in a continual state of flux, Selman has embarked on a related weekly project that he calls NewsX365, whereby he samples the headlines from three different news outlets on the same subject and interprets their diverse perspectives through poster images. Below Selman and I discuss motives, selections and relevance in today’s saturated fact-versus-fiction news and views environment.
Tell us a bit more about the new project’s roots in BBCx365.
BBCx365 was a marathon of a project. 365 posters, one a day for a year, based on BBC News headlines. That project opened a lot of doors for me. I think the scale of it was what drew folks in—the challenge of it, the ambition of it. BBCx365 was my graduate school thesis project at Academy of Art University, and my wife and I packed our car and drove from San Francisco to New York City the day after graduation. After arriving in New York, I began doing editorial illustrations for The New York Times, working on the USA Today rebrand at Wolff Olins, and collaborating with the Google Creative Lab. Two years later, I founded my own design studio, Selman.
So, fast forward 15 years to NewsX365 …
I got the poster-making itch again. Well, that simplifies the spark quite a lot. It was a cauldron of things swirling around that led to opening this idea back up. First of all, I love designing topical posters, graphics, magazine covers and editorial illustrations—my wife calls it my “safe space.” At Selman, we do some of that as well, but we focus predominantly on branding and creative campaigns. Secondly, 2025 was gearing up to be a pivotal year for America, for better or worse. And lastly, so much has changed in the past 15 years, and the more I thought about it, the more interesting it became to revisit the spirit of BBCx365 in the context of today’s news habits, polarization and bias.
Week 02 – Los Angeles Wildfires
A lot has indeed changed in the past 15 years, but in doing NewsX365, what do you experience as having significantly altered our lives?
Today, 86% of U.S. adults say they get news from a device. For comparison, in 2010, only half of Americans occasionally got their news on a computer; almost everyone got their news from TV, and Facebook had just gotten a patent for a thing called the “newsfeed.” So, given the fact that most people consume news on their devices from sources they follow on apps they downloaded, media bubbles have naturally formed around all of us. New research on political behavior finds that most Democratic and Republican voters live in partisan bubbles, with little daily exposure to those who belong to the other party. That has propelled an unprecedented erosion of trust in the media. Today, the proliferation of false content online is pervasive and exacerbates the erosion of global trust in institutions. In fact, only 40% of people say they consistently trust the news.
Within these new shifts, I felt that the spirit of the original project could be channeled in a meaningful way, but it would have to dig a little deeper.
Week 09 – Zelenskyy at the White House
You are producing three posters based on one news story per week. Where do you get your content?
I’m designing three posters each week that highlight the biggest news story of that week. 52 weeks. I’m looking at how different news outlets across the political spectrum frame their reporting on the story. I’m getting those perspectives from MSNBC, the Associated Press and Fox News. My goal is to highlight those perspectives with each of the posters in the set of three for that week—leaning right with Fox, left with MSNBC, and down the center with AP.
Week 19 – The Smithsonian
Can you be certain that the news you are cherry-picking is indeed accurate?
There’s a good amount of variety to choose from each of the sources on any particular weekly news subject. There are interviews, factual reporting, talking heads, and opinion pieces. From what I’ve experienced this year so far, the bias has been more telling by what is omitted from an outlet’s reporting than by finding things that are overtly inaccurate. With each story, it’s almost as if there are several dials, and each outlet decides which ones to turn up, which ones to turn down, and which ones to turn completely off.
The point of this project isn’t to report the accuracy of the news, but it’s to highlight the information that’s being reported to shine a light on the contrasts of information and bias.
Week 21 – South African Farmers
What kind of events and issues are you most drawn to?
This year’s focus has largely been on the Trump administration and its foreign and domestic policy. These stories are hard to ignore because of how large an impact they have on everyday Americans’ lives. Also, the bias is most evident.
Week 24 – Army Parade
What is your method of delivery?
[As of last week] I’m 30 weeks into the year so far, and we just launched the project website.
I’m trying to meet people where they natively get their news, so I’m regularly posting on X, Bluesky, Threads, Instagram and Facebook. All of these project accounts are relatively new, so there’s not much activity yet, but I wanted to see what gets traction. I think that’s an interesting metric in itself, where X has gotten a rap for being a right-wing echo chamber and Bluesky has grown to be the liberal counterpoint. I’ve never had much of a stake in either before this, so it’s all new to me, but I’m super interested in seeing how things play out.
Week 25 – Airstrikes on Iran
What differentiates the audience response from the first x360 to now?
I’ve been working on the project in the background this year, and I’ve just pushed everything live over the past few weeks. It’s hard to gauge the response at this point, but from the folks I talk to, they’re excited. There was a lot of love for the project 15 years ago, and this reboot seems to resonate with people. Everyone seems to understand that there’s media bias and partisan bubbles. I don’t ever have to work hard to get that point across. The peripheral pushback I’ve started to see is “who cares?” I’ve asked myself, what the hell is 156 more posters going to do?
Well, I think you’re damn sure going to lose every battle you don’t engage in. And we are at a tipping point with our relationship with the truth.
My goal with this project is to appeal to the left and the right. Showing multiple perspectives is important to understanding the total picture. I’m a liberal, and I didn’t read Fox News until this project. I approach it with an open mind and try to design graphics that portray the story in the particular light that it’s framed in. Sure, I bring my own bias to the party, I get that. But I’m doing my best to leave it at the door.
Week 30 – Starvation in Gaza
Do you believe that biased reporting and commentary is acceptably inconsequential in Trumpworld?
Biased reporting has always been around, but it occupies way more bandwidth these days. And the flanks of our political media spectrum are where most people orbit. Unfortunately, the lines between opinion and fact, true and false, are beyond blurred right now. I think people prefer reporting with a point of view, especially if it reinforces their own. Where we get into dangerous territory is when that POV amplifies things that aren’t true.
Is there a wider or narrower audience today than when you started 15 years ago?
The audience that I am trying to reach with NewsX365 is the same—Americans. The goal is different, though. Fifteen years ago, the goal was to learn more about the world around us. Today, it’s to learn more about us and our impact on the world.
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