August 29, 2026

Week of 22–28 August 2026

1,302 stories across four markets, 30,462 articles.

On this page

Between 22 August and 28 August 2026 this project collected 30,462 articles and grouped them into 1,302 stories across four markets. A story is a cluster of articles close enough in meaning to be the same event³; independence is counted in owners, not outlets⁴. Superscripts link into the method page, where each measurement is defined once.

Volume

Counts are after duplicate feed entries are merged², and they are not flat across the week: a weekend day runs about half a weekday¹.

Market	Articles	Stories	In a story	Baseline share
us-national	12,398	512	35%	18%
uk-national	6,245	251	27%	28%
uk-regional	7,418	314	24%	32%
intl-state	4,401	225	33%	20%

What the week was about

Stories ranked by the number of owners carrying them — The ranking is by owners, not by article count: what matters is how widely a story travelled, not how much was written.

The three widest stories in each market, with the words that separate each from the rest of its week⁶:

us-national. Canada announces retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. as the countries' trade fight deepens — 27 owners, 173 articles, published over 24 hours (Canada, tariffs, Lake, Ontario). U.S. to detail new economic pressures on Iran. And, Canada to impose tariffs on U.S. — 22 owners, 153 articles, published over 23 hours (Iran, Canada, economic, Bessent). Rest in peace, Dolly Parton: Letters to the Editor — Aug. 27, 2026 — 21 owners, 84 articles, published over 24 hours (Parton, Dolly, cancer, music).

uk-national. Nepal floods devastation in shocking pictures with hundreds dead and 33 Brits missing — 11 owners, 36 articles, published over 23 hours (Nepal, missing, flash, Tibet). Data stolen from customers after three airports targeted in cyber attack — 9 owners, 13 articles, published over 7 hours (airports, data, cyber, Stansted). Police officers killed in wrong-way crash mourned in 'unimaginable loss' — 8 owners, 61 articles, published over 22 hours (killed, crash, CrossCountry, police).

uk-regional. Ferry passport rule change should include Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein says — 5 owners, 8 articles, published over 5 hours (passport, ferry, Ireland, passengers). South Bristol A-road crash update as biker taken to hospital — 4 owners, 61 articles, published over 15 hours (crash, enclosure, crocodile, police). Birmingham flooding update as Met Office issues grim forecast after city battered by storm — 4 owners, 33 articles, published over 23 hours (flooding, thunderstorms, Met, yellow).

intl-state. Nepal-Tibet flood death toll passes 500 as rescue resumes — 9 owners, 51 articles, published over 23 hours (Nepal, floods, rescue, missing). Trump administration announces ‘economic D-day’ sanctions on Iran — 9 owners, 28 articles, published over 20 hours (Iran, Bessent, economic, Scott). Iran war live: US slaps new sanctions on Iran, warns Tehran trade partners — 9 owners, 27 articles, published over 22 hours (sanctions, Iran, economic, unilateral).

The same day in four markets

Stories are clustered inside a market and never across them⁷. The boundary is worth reading on its own, because most of what a market carries never crosses it.

Market	Stories	Also carried in another market
us-national	512	22%
uk-national	251	52%
uk-regional	314	29%
intl-state	225	38%

The match behind that last column is deliberately loose⁸: the claim being made is “nobody else ran this”, so it should fail towards saying a story travelled. At the strict threshold the same shares are 17%, 44%, 23% and 28%, in the order above.

Where an event did cross, the wording is the interesting part. The same day, the same event, as each market ran it:

Tuesday 25 August

Market	Headline as it ran there	Owners	Articles
us-national	Canada announces retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. as the countries' trade fight deepens	27	173
uk-national	Trump 'giving serious consideration' to renaming Lake Ontario as Canada trade war deepens	6	11
uk-regional	Canada strikes back at US with retaliatory tariffs as trade war escalates	1	4
intl-state	Canada announces retaliatory tariffs on US goods	7	13

Tuesday 25 August

Market	Headline as it ran there	Owners	Articles
us-national	Dolly Parton, country music legend and cultural icon, dead at 80	18	135
uk-national	Dolly Parton remembered as ‘true country music icon’	4	18
uk-regional	Dolly Parton dies, aged 80, family announce	4	27
intl-state	US country music legend Dolly Parton dies aged 80	3	7

Thursday 27 August

Market	Headline as it ran there	Owners	Articles
us-national	Hundreds missing, scores dead in Nepal, Tibet after flash flooding, mud flow	18	66
uk-national	Nepal floods devastation in shocking pictures with hundreds dead and 33 Brits missing	11	36
uk-regional	UK offers £5 million to Nepal following country’s devastating flash floods	2	5
intl-state	Nepal floods: More than 160 killed, nearly 1,400 missing	8	50

The other side of the same measurement is what one market carried and nobody else did⁹. For intl-state that is 62% of its stories this week:

Carried only by state broadcasters	Day	Owners	Articles
DR Congo, M23 fighters agree on roadmap for peace talks roadmap, Congo, peace, agree	Sun	5	5
Haiti gang members kill around 40 displaced people in church attack near capital gang, Haiti, attack, capital	Tue	4	7
At least 12 dead, 54 injured as wildfires ravage northeastern Algeria Algeria, wildfires, heatwave, Sayoud	Thu	4	5
Iran says Pakistan's army chief to visit Tehran on Monday Monday, Pakistan, Tehran, army	Sun	4	4
Iran announces massive gas discovery gas, cubic, field, discovered	Sun	4	4
Russia launches Soyuz-2.1b rocket carrying spacecraft from Plesetsk Cosmodrome Soyuz, rocket, spacecraft, Plesetsk	Mon	4	4

How far stories travel

Distribution of owners per story — Most stories stop at three or four owners. The tail to the right is what a week actually shares.

Owner counts here are corrected for wire copy: two owners running one agency text under two mastheads count once between them⁵.

How long a story lasts

Owners carrying each long-running story, day by day — One panel per story that ran more than a single day. The line is how many owners carried it that day, so the shape says whether it spread, held, or faded.

A week-long story is a chain of daily clusters rather than one object¹⁰. Ordering is by how much of this week a story occupied, and it has to hold at least 3 days of it to appear¹¹. The column worth reading is the last one: a story that opens wide was already everyone’s on day one, and one that opens narrow had to travel first¹².

Each owner’s first, middle and last article in one story — The week’s largest story, one row per owner, ordered by when that owner first published. The dot sits on that owner’s first article and its area is how many they ran; the line runs on to their last. The bars along the top are how many articles ran in each 6-hour window.

Counting owners per day says how wide a story got; the rows above say how it filled up¹³. It is one story, though, not a claim about how these owners behave¹⁴.

Story	Where it ended	Market	Ran	Articles	Owners, day 1 → total
A66 crash: Two police officers killed in the incident named crash, police, killed, officers	Middlesbrough gang war LIVE: Cars set ablaze at Teesside A66 crash victim	uk-national	22–28 Aug	294	8 → 9
Prosecution rests in Lindsay Clancy murder trial. Defense now gets its turn Clancy, Lindsay, trial, murder	Key things to know about Lindsay Clancy's case after judge declares mistrial	us-national	17 Aug – 4 Sep	433	5 → 23
Bayern Munich's Jamal Musiala reveals 'neurological' issue after collapsing on vencen, con, jonrón, Los	Bayern Munich crush Stuttgart 5-1 in Bundesliga opener	us-national	18–28 Aug	367	3 → 17
UK weather maps show 47 areas to face heavy rain this week as heatwave thunderstorms, Met, rain, Office	Yellow thunderstorm warning issued as festivalgoers face more wet weather	uk-national	17–29 Aug	129	7 → 8
U.S., Canada in last-minute talks to head off steep new U.S. tariffs Canada, tariffs, trade, Iran	US Weighs More Trade Measures Against Canada	us-national	18–26 Aug	483	11 → 29
Watch live: Trump stumps for Darline Graham in South Carolina Graham, Darline, Carolina, runoff	Sen. Darline Graham wins the Republican Senate primary runoff in South	us-national	21–26 Aug	148	13 → 25
Enes Kanter Freedom set to attend Fever-Sky game as WNBA trans controversy Kanter, Freedom, Enes, WNBA	Sky owner declines to say if Kanter Freedom would be allowed to play at	us-national	23–27 Aug	53	2 → 12
Iran warns nearby nations against joining US ‘economic war’ efforts Iran, sanctions, economic, Tehran	How US sanctions on Iran could spread risks and costs worldwide	intl-state	22–26 Aug	81	8 → 11

Who moves together

Owner pairs ranked by excess co-occurrence — Measured against a null model that keeps both the size of each story and the output of each owner, so neither big news nor a prolific outlet can produce a score on its own. Computed over the whole archive, not just this week: the signal is longitudinal and a single week is too noisy to read.

A high score means two owners run the same stories more often than their volumes explain, which is not the same as coordination¹⁵. What it cannot say is whether either is following the other; for that the next section uses the clock.

How stories move between newsrooms

Owner pairs that publish closer together than the story explains — Inside every story each pair of owners is ranked by how close together the two published, measured against all the other pairs in that same story. Scoring against the story itself is what keeps big news out of the result: an event everybody reaches within the hour makes every pair look fast, and only a pair that is fast relative to its own story survives.

Direction is what separates the mechanisms, and it is the part a co-occurrence count cannot see¹⁶.

Pair	Market	Relationship	Typical gap	Stories
Breitbart News Network ↔ Time USA (Benioff)	us-national	both ways	150 min	27
Associated Press ↔ Warner Bros Discovery	us-national	both ways	112 min	122
Reach plc ↔ DMGT	uk-national	both ways	106 min	181
Lebedev Holdings ↔ Independent Digital News and Media	uk-national	both ways	35 min	96
IAC → Breitbart News Network	us-national	one way	178 min	62
Anadolu Ajansi → TRT	intl-state	one way	87 min	140
Time USA (Benioff) ↔ WETA	us-national	both ways	171 min	23

Measured over the whole archive rather than this week, and only after two controls: each owner’s own speed is subtracted, and the pair’s tightest quarter of stories is dropped¹⁷.

The same measurement can be asked of a single owner: is it upstream of the newsrooms it shares stories with, or downstream of them¹⁸?

Market	Upstream of its partners	Downstream of them
us-national	Associated Press z 11.5	Time USA z −6.5
uk-national	Reach plc z 6.6	Peoples Press z −4.7
uk-regional	—	Gannett z −2.0
intl-state	Anadolu Ajansi z 2.9	TRT z −2.2

The two ends read differently, and neither is an accusation¹⁹.

What the headline said first

Every version of an article’s text is kept, so a headline that changes after publication is visible. This week 1,993 headlines were rewritten, 887 of them substantially — less than half the words survived — and the median rewrite landed 4.3 hours after the article first appeared. Not all of that is a newsroom changing its mind²⁰: requiring the two versions to be recognisably the same sentence, changed within a day, leaves 643 — and those are the ones below.

This is the one place in the corpus where an editorial decision is observed twice — the same newsroom, the same story, two framings hours apart²¹.

Irish News — “Fermanagh road closed due to fire” → “Co Fermanagh road reopened after dozens of firefighters tackle blaze”
BBC — “PC killed in wrong-way crash was 'our hero', family says” → “PCs killed in A66 crash were heroes, say families”
Paramount — “Out-of-control Hawk Fire in Reno, Nevada keeping tens of thousands evacuated” → “Hawk Fire evacuations in Reno slightly eased as firefighters make gains”
Bloomberg — “US Hits Canada With 50% Tariffs as Carney Vows to Retaliate” → “Trump Vows to Double Canadian Auto Tariffs”
Warner Bros — “More than a dozen infants killed in hospital fire in Pakistan’s capital” → “‘No one can understand the pain:’ Fire in maternity ward kills at least 14 newborn babies in Pakistan’s capital”
Associated Press — “Prosecution psychiatrist returns to stand as last witness in Lindsay Clancy trial” → “Lindsay Clancy trial: Testimony concludes and closing arguments expected Thursday”

The examples are drawn from stories that at least 4 owners carried, not from the largest rewrites²².

Rewriting is not evenly spread. Emerson Collective changed the headline on 36% of what it published this week; across the owners with enough output to measure the rate runs from that down to a percent or two²³.

What the rewrites do not show is a softening of language. Quotation marks appear in 156 rewritten headlines and disappear from 99; words that hold a claim at arm’s length — so-called, alleged, reportedly — move in 9 and out of 11. At that size neither is a finding. Distancing is thin enough in headlines that it has to be measured across the whole corpus rather than inside its edits, which is the next section.

Words that have to be quoted

This project is named after the Overton window, and everything above measures something else: the shape of distribution. The window is answered by how a word is marked, not by how far it travels²⁴.

How often each term appears inside quotation marks — Counted over headlines and summaries in all four markets this week. A quoted term is one the outlet did not say in its own voice: either it flagged the word itself, or the word arrived inside someone else’s sentence.

Term	Mentions	In quotation marks	Share
woke	74	29	39%
terrorist	97	33	34%
genocide	75	12	16%
illegal	268	27	10%
far-right	64	3	5%
inflation	168	6	4%
election	416	8	2%
police	1,816	28	2%
migrant	97	1	1%

The separation is an order of magnitude and it is not subtle. Nothing about the count knows which words are contested — the list is fixed in advance, and it has to be²⁵. Read the shares as a level, not as a movement²⁶: the window is the change in them over months.

Method

Every measurement above is defined once, on the method page — the superscripts throughout this report link straight into it. Reports are generated without human editing and without a language model²⁷.