Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Numbered News is a daily, data-driven snapshot of the world’s most widely reported stories. Instead of relying on editorial judgment or algorithmic personalization, we analyze thousands of global headlines, group them into shared news events, and rank those events by a simple and transparent metric: how many unique news outlets are covering each story. The result is a clear, bias-free view of what the world’s journalists collectively consider most important―all in one place, and easy to scan in minutes.

Every day, Numbered News ingests thousands of headlines from global newsrooms and groups them into collective stories using modern text-analysis models. We then measure how many independent publishers are reporting each story, ranking them purely by coverage volume — not opinion or editorial framing. The highest-ranked stories become the daily report you see on the site and in the newsletter.

You’re busy―but you still want to know what truly matters. Each morning, Numbered News delivers a clean, bias-free snapshot of the 10 most widely covered global stories, no noise or doomscrolling required. The website shows the top five, but the newsletter gives you the full top ten plus an easy way to catch up on past reports right from your inbox.

Numbered News ranks stories solely by how many unique news sources are reporting them. The more unique publishers covering a story, the higher it appears on the list. If one outlet publishes multiple headlines about the same event, it still counts as only one source, which prevents any single publisher from influencing the rankings. No opinions, no personalization algorithms, no weighting.

For every story, Numbered News shows one representative headline from each news source. If a publisher released multiple headlines about the same event, we randomly choose one to avoid duplication. This keeps the report concise, clean, and easy to scan while still giving you a broad view of who covered the story.

No. Numbered News does not summarize or reproduce article content. Instead, we rely solely on headline titles and public metadata, which are not copyrightable. Our rankings are based on factual analysis of this publicly available information, not on the text of the articles themselves. To learn more about any story, you can click through to the original sources reporting it, and we encourage you to do so!

Numbered News includes a curated set of reputable, high-traffic English-language news organizations. The full list of sources we monitor is available here (link).

To ensure fairness and consistency, sources are selected using clear criteria based on measurable popularity (public web-traffic data) and notable popularity (globally recognized, influential outlets).

Because it’s not feasible—or useful—to process headlines from every publication worldwide, sources must meet several baseline requirements: they must publish predominantly original reporting, reach a minimum audience size, cover mainstream news topics, and make their content publicly accessible for programatic access. These requirements help ensure that each day’s report is built from credible, widely-read publishers whose coverage can be reliably and automatically analyzed.

Right now, Numbered News processes English-language reporting only. While the long-term goal is to include publications from many diverse languages, the initial version focuses on English due to technical limitations, translation requirements, and the need for consistent, reliable access to source data. As the platform grows, we plan to expand coverage to additional languages and regions.

Yes. Numbered News uses AI in two limited, transparent ways: to group related headlines into unified story events, and to generate neutral, concise story titles using strictly factual prompting. AI is not used to interpret, rewrite, or summarize article content, and it never influences the ranking of stories. All rankings come solely from measurable, deterministic analysis.

Numbered News publishes a new report every day, 365 days a year. Each edition reflects the most widely covered stories from the previous 24 hours, measured in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC).