Week of 12–18 September 2026

Between 12 September and 18 September 2026 this project collected 106,759 articles and grouped them into 4,376 stories across seven 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. The owner column counts the owners that carried at least one story, which is the number the rest of the report is measured against — a story reaching six of them is a different thing in a market of thirty-three and in a market of six.

This report is written in English, but three of the markets are not — headlines from de-national, ru-domestic and ar-pan appear below as they ran, untranslated.

Of the 158 feeds polled in these markets, 2 produced nothing at all this week³².

Story counts leave out standing sections — the weather for forty cities, exchange rates, lottery draws — which cluster perfectly well and are not events³⁶. Four more markets are collected and measured the same way without appearing in this report; each market, reported or not, has a page of its own that this run rewrites.

Stories per market for every full week collected so far. The series is recomputed from the archive each time a report is built rather than copied from earlier ones, so a number here can differ from the number that was printed then³⁰.

What the week was about

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

us-national. Not Even the Supreme Court Can Stop Trump’s Most Insidious Midterms Trick — 28 owners, 147 articles, published over 23 hours (mail, Court, Supreme, voting). As AI fears spike, Trump bats down calls for regulation — 23 owners, 93 articles, published over 23 hours (slowdown, CEO, development, Anthropic). Fed hikes interest rates by quarter point — 21 owners, 93 articles, published over 24 hours (rates, interest, Fed, Reserve).

uk-national. Boris Johnson 'forced to evacuate train' after Russian drone strike near Ukraine-Poland border — 11 owners, 20 articles, published over 13 hours (train, drone, Boris, Johnson). US President Donald Trump says he would ‘love to see’ a united Ireland — 10 owners, 30 articles, published over 23 hours (Ireland, Trump, visit, Donald). Reform UK’s £72m donations may be caught by new bill, Rayner suggests — 10 owners, 27 articles, published over 15 hours (Reform, donations, Harborne, Delo).

uk-regional. Live updates as devolved leaders unite to sign historic independence declaration — 5 owners, 19 articles, published over 13 hours (agreement, sign, Sinn, leaders). Sisters say 'we're getting stronger' after horror 'wrong-way' motorway crash killed 5 — 4 owners, 34 articles, published over 16 hours (family, armed, Ukraine, forces). Reform UK receives second record-breaking £36m donation from crypto billionaire — 4 owners, 17 articles, published over 15 hours (Reform, donation, billionaire, crypto).

intl-state. Fresh Russian Strikes Hit Ukraine As US House Passes Sanctions Bill Targeting Moscow — 10 owners, 29 articles, published over 21 hours (sanctions, bill, Yaroslavl, refinery). President Xi welcomed by Modi at BRICS Summit — 9 owners, 61 articles, published over 22 hours (BRICS, summit, India, Jinping). Ukraine, Poland say Russia hit Warsaw-bound passenger train — 9 owners, 36 articles, published over 19 hours (train, Russian, border, Poland).

de-national. Merz in der Krise: Unterstützung um fünf vor Landtagswahl — 16 owners, 229 articles, published over 23 hours (Leyen, Ministerpräsidenten, Reiche, Kommissionspräsidentin). Tanken immer teurer: Koalition ringt weiter um Entlastung bei Spritpreisen — 14 owners, 201 articles, published over 23 hours (Tankrabatt, Bundesregierung, Spritpreise, Entlastung). Erste DFB-Auswahl: 44 Mann! Das ist Jürgen Klopps Riesenkader — 14 owners, 81 articles, published over 16 hours (Klopp, Kader, Jürgen, DFB).

ru-domestic. ВС РФ уничтожили до 125 боевиков ВСУ в Харьковской области — 19 owners, 124 articles, published over 22 hours (ВСУ, сутки, Минобороны, Белгородской). Трамп потребовал от Зеленского прекратить удары по производству дизеля в России — 19 owners, 37 articles, published over 10 hours (Трамп, прекратить, удары, Дональд). Два человека ранены при атаке ВСУ на машину в российском регионе — 18 owners, 108 articles, published over 19 hours (ВСУ, Белгородской, Черноморск, силы).

ar-pan. الدفاع المدني بغزة: ارتفاع عدد ضحايا انهيار مبنى يؤوي نازحين في مدينة غزة إلى 21 بينهم 8 أطفال و6 نساء — 15 owners, 65 articles, published over 21 hours (غزة, انهيار, مبنى, الأنقاض). إدانات إسلامية لـ"محاولة استهداف مكة" والحوثيون ينفون — 13 owners, 45 articles, published over 23 hours (مكة, المكرمة, استهداف, محاولة). اليمن.. قوات حكومية تعلن تنفيذ غارات على مواقع للحوثيين في الضالع — 11 owners, 67 articles, published over 23 hours (جنوبي, الإبحار, المنصوري, غارات).

Reaching several newsrooms and being written about a lot are not the same thing³¹. The most lopsided story in each market — it travelled, and most of what was written about it still came from one owner:

The same day in seven 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.

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 28%, 50%, 28%, 50%, 22%, 6% and 21%, in the order above.

197 events ran in more than one market this week, and 145 of them crossed a language boundary³³. The table below shows only those that reached three markets or more; most crossings are between two, so a story picked up in English and in German on the same day is counted here and not shown there.

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

Tuesday 15 September

Wednesday 16 September

Thursday 17 September

The other side of the same measurement is what a market carried and nobody else did⁹:

intl-state is the row worth reading in full: the state-funded broadcasters are kept as their own market precisely because they are a labelled example of coordinated promotion, so the stories only they carried are the ones to look at.

How far stories travel

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

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.

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.

Who moves together

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. Only pairs above a score of three appear, which is where pairs thrown up by chance alone stop appearing²⁹.

One market can be checked against something already known³⁴. The outlets in intl-state answer to different governments, and three pairs of them answer to the same one — Anadolu Ajansi with TRT, Rossiya Segodnya with TASS and China Media with People's Daily. The measure puts those pairs 1st, 2nd and 3rd of 46 in that market.

How stories move between newsrooms

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

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. Timing is the noisier of the two measurements in this report, so the bar here is the same three and worth taking literally²⁹, and a pair also has to hold up in each half of the archive counted on its own³⁵.

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

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 section counts the four English-language markets only, not all seven²⁸. This week 1,707 headlines were rewritten there, 784 of them substantially — less than half the words survived — and the median rewrite landed 3.7 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 556 — 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.

• France Medias — “BRICS leaders gather in India as wars and US tensions test unity” → “BRICS leaders call for 'maximum restraint' as Middle East war threatens unity”
• DMGT — “£72m crypto-billionaire donations will make Reform ready to rule, says Farage” → “Labour warns Farage over £72m in donations: You can’t buy your way into our democracy”
• Comcast — “Boris Johnson in security scare after train hit by Russian drone in Ukraine” → “Boris Johnson narrowly escapes drone attack - as Russia accused of 'escalation'”
• Versant Media — “What to watch as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent testifies before Congress” → “Scott Bessent defends Treasury intervention, Trump economy in contentious House hearing”
• Scott Trust — “UK inflation rises to 3.1%, piling more pressure on households” → “Burnham warns of ‘difficult decisions’ in budget as inflation rises to 3.1%”
• Comcast — “Bonnie Greer, playwright and novelist, dies aged 77” → “Acclaimed playwright and author dies after brief illness”

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 30% 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 155 rewritten headlines and disappear from 101; words that hold a claim at arm’s length — so-called, alleged, reportedly — move in 20 and out of 22. 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.

Counted over the four English-language markets only²⁸. 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.