Newsroom leaderboard

Who gets there first, and who gets followed.

We read 18 independent newsrooms continuously and log the moment each one appears on a story. Over the last 30 days, this is what that log says: how often a newsroom's stories were picked up by somebody else, how often it got there first, and how long its head start lasted. Measured on one clock — ours — applied identically to all 18.

newsrooms read

RSS, every couple of minutes

2,323

stories logged

in the last 30 days

412

with arrival times

18% of the archive

watched from the start

the only ones that can show a first

	Newsroom	Carried by another	Stories run	First in	Median lead	Ran alone
1	NDTV	67%	15	0 of 1 · 0%	—	5
2	Axios	62%	13	—	—	5
3	CBS News	39%	46	2 of 3 · 67%	46m	28
4	The Hill	38%	13	—	—	8
5	France 24	38%	13	—	—	8
6	Sky	35%	34	0 of 1 · 0%	—	22
7	Euronews	35%	26	—	—	17
8	ABC News	33%	43	—	—	29
9	NBC News	33%	24	1 of 1 · 100%	46m	16
10	Guardian	30%	57	—	—	40
11	BBC	29%	63	0 of 2 · 0%	—	45
12	NPR	27%	41	1 of 1 · 100%	50m	30
13	CNBC	27%	15	—	—	11
14	Al Jazeera	27%	15	—	—	11
15	Fox News	21%	39	0 of 1 · 0%	—	31
16	Nature	15%	13	—	—	11
17	CNN	4%	24	—	—	23
18	ABC Australia	0%	18	—	—	18

What these columns are, and what they are not

This is not a ranking of trustworthiness, and it is not a quality score. A newsroom with a strong local desk runs stories nobody else covers, and its "carried by another" figure goes down for doing exactly the work you would want it to do. Read the first column as breadth of overlap with the rest of the press, and nothing more.

Carried by anotherOf the stories this newsroom ran, the share at least one other independent newsroom also ran. The same measurement we apply to X accounts.

Stories runDistinct stories we saw it on in the window. Two feeds from the same newsroom count once.

First inOf the stories we watched arrive — found at a single newsroom, then saw the others turn up — how often this one was that single newsroom. A story we discovered when four newsrooms already had it counts for nobody: we walked in late, and our arrival is not their scoop.

Median leadWhen it was first, the typical gap before a second newsroom arrived. Stories nobody else ran have no lead time and are left out rather than scored as an enormous one.

Every figure uses our sighting clock, never the RSS publish date. A publish date is the publisher's own claim — they backdate, they re-date on revision, and they disagree about timezones. Ranking newsrooms on a field each of them controls would be handing them the scoreboard. Newsrooms we have seen fewer than 12 times are shown but not ranked, because a high rate over a handful of stories is luck wearing a rosette.

What we cannot see, we do not score. Of the 2,323 stories logged in this window, 4 were found at a single newsroom and then watched as the others arrived — only those can say who was first. The rest were already multi-sourced when we found them, and every newsroom on them is left out of the first-in column rather than credited with a scoop that is really just the moment we looked.

A pickup rate is not a truth rating. It counts how often the press followed this account, not how often the account was right — newsrooms have been wrong together before, and a claim nobody carried can still be true. Posts older than the news window we hold are shown as unknown, never as misses.