How we work

One event, and how Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Brussels, the Gulf, London and Tokyo each tell it.

What we read

News feeds from outlets in seven blocs, in English, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, French, German and Japanese, and the release feeds of governments and institutions. Every feed is listed on the front page under The wires, with its voice (state, public, private, exile or official), its language and a link to the outlet. A feed is admitted only after we have measured it working, its robots.txt allows our crawler, and any machine-readable reservation of text-and-data mining has been read. We read the headline and the standfirst; nothing behind a paywall, and no article text.

What we write

For each event we write a headline, a short account of what happened, and one line per bloc characterising how that bloc's outlets told it — every line ours, with the outlets linked. We never show a publisher's headline or text. Contested claims are attributed (“Xinhua reports…”, “the State Department denies…”); a single-source allegation about a named person is left out, not softened.

State outlets

A bloc's state press is how that bloc tells a story, so it is on the map — labelled STATE on every row, for ever, and never merged with private press into one line. An outlet enters only after a recorded check of its legal position in the UK, the EU and the US. Outlets under sanctions or broadcast bans there — RT, Sputnik, RIA Novosti, Izvestia, Press TV and others — are refused, in text and in video.

The numbers

The left rail counts what we take in: articles per bloc per hour, the languages and the voices. It measures our intake, not the world's news volume — a bloc with more feeds says more. The right rail shows who is live on television now, the official releases of the day, and any feed we have not heard from.

Times

Every printed time is UTC. Ages (“12m”) are counted by your browser from those times, so the page never claims a freshness it does not have.