The wire

How this page works

Stories the world's press is converging on — measured, not chosen. Every 15 minutes GDELT observes global news output; headlines covering the same story are grouped into one cluster (rewordings and syndicated variants collapse together), and related developments of one event nest under its lead story. Each headline links once to the original reporting. Ranking is a published formula, not an editor: outlet breadth (log-damped, weighted by a disclosed source-authority list), boosted when a story carries conflict, disaster, or diplomacy themes in its lede, a coded geopolitical event, or extracted casualty and protest figures — then decayed by time since last sighting over a rolling 72-hour window. Tone is the average sentiment of the cluster's articles. “From N countries” counts the distinct home countries of the covering outlets (mapped per domain from GDELT source-country data) and is shown only when enough of a cluster's outlets are mapped to state it honestly. No personalization — the ranking is the measurement, and the formula is open. Lead outlets classified as state-controlled media are labeled, using Wikipedia's perennial sources list (CC BY-SA) plus a small disclosed list of state wires; the label describes ownership, not accuracy, and state wires are already excluded from authority weighting.