How this works

01What we read

Every morning we read eighteen major newsrooms: their front pages, and the sections behind them. We also read specialist, trade and regional publications, where a story often appears first.

The sixteen newsrooms whose front pages we measure:

• The New York Times
• BBC News
• The Guardian
• CNN
• Fox News
• USA Today
• CBS News
• ABC News
• Los Angeles Times
• PBS NewsHour
• CNBC
• CBC News
• Sky News
• Deutsche Welle
• France 24
• The Times of India

Two more we read, but can't measure their front pages. We never say one of them skipped a story:

• The Wall Street Journal
• NPR

Where a newsroom's feed doesn't follow its homepage, we read the homepage itself, once a morning, as a reader that gives its name and follows each site's rules for automated readers. A site that refuses it isn't measured.

We read headlines and summaries, then link to the original. We don't copy anyone's reporting.

02How a story gets here

1. 1
   Read

   Every item from all 105 feeds and front pages, about 2,700 on a typical day.

2. 2
   Group

   The same story from different outlets is grouped into one, so a story counts once however many places ran it.

3. 3
   Score

   A language model (Claude, made by Anthropic) rates each story's significance from 0 to 10. It is never told how widely the story was carried.

4. 4
   Measure attention

   Separately, we count how many outlets carried the story and whether any front page put it on top. We also measure how much the front pages are crowded by one subject.

5. 5
   Rank, then a person decides

   Stories that are significant but got little attention rise to the top. A person reads each one before it is published. Nothing appears here automatically.

03The significance score

Each story gets a score out of 10 for how much it matters. A story carried on six front pages ranks near the bottom however important it is: you have already seen it. The score weighs five things:

Scale

How many people it affects

Impact

How much it changes their lives

Novelty

Whether it is genuinely new

Potential

What it could lead to

Credibility

How solid the reporting is

6 out of 10 is high on this scale. Most news, including much of what leads the front pages, scores between 2 and 4. In our first test, only 1 story in 8 scored 6 or more:

So when a story here shows 5.9 / 10, it is among the more significant stories of its day, not a middling one.

04What a person decides

The ranking proposes; a person publishes. Every story on this site was read and approved before it appeared, and stories that don't hold up are dropped, however well they scored. Articles are written by a person, from the sources listed at the bottom of each one.

Mistakes are corrected openly. A correction is dated and stays on the page; nothing is quietly rewritten.

05What this can't tell you

• The score is a model's judgement, checked by a person. It can be wrong, and a score of 6.2 is not meaningfully different from 5.9.
• We read English-language feeds from large newsrooms and specialist publications. A story none of them carried won't reach us.
• "Not on a front page" means not on the front pages we measure, at the times we measured them.