Week of 19–25 September 2026

Between 19 September and 25 September 2026 this project collected 109,047 articles and grouped them into 4,435 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 159 feeds polled in these markets, 1 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. Major TV Networks Skip Trump's Xi Welcome Amid White House Press Ban — 27 owners, 196 articles, published over 24 hours (President, Trump, Iran, White). Five top takeaways from Trump's high-stakes UN speech to the world — 25 owners, 130 articles, published over 23 hours (Assembly, Trump, General, Iran). As Trump Hosts Xi at Summit, Pomp May Paper Over U.S.-China Tensions — 24 owners, 217 articles, published over 24 hours (White, House, judge, Jinping).

uk-national. Trump says relations between US and UK better under Burnham than Starmer as pair meet for first time — 10 owners, 49 articles, published over 23 hours (Trump, Burnham, meeting, Donald). Pressure mounts on air traffic control boss after latest disruption — 9 owners, 25 articles, published over 17 hours (traffic, air, control, flights). Watch: Key moments from Andy Burnham's first UN speech — 9 owners, 16 articles, published over 17 hours (Burnham, speech, disinformation, Andy).

uk-regional. Solihull murder probe live as man dies following 'disorder' — 5 owners, 39 articles, published over 20 hours (cordon, police, emergency, Westlink). Huge emergency services scene updates after 'serious' house fire in Bootle — 4 owners, 63 articles, published over 17 hours (fire, Bootle, house, police). Police CCTV appeal after woman sexually assaulted in Salford — 4 owners, 62 articles, published over 17 hours (Omagh, inquiry, bombing, cans).

intl-state. Turkish, Ukrainian presidents hold sideline talks in New York — 10 owners, 101 articles, published over 23 hours (Assembly, General, Pezeshkian, President). Trump says Ukraine, Russia 'going to make a deal,' discusses Patriot missile production — 9 owners, 121 articles, published over 23 hours (Greenland, Trump, deal, Zelensky). Trump welcomes China’s Xi Jinping to White House — 9 owners, 98 articles, published over 23 hours (Trump, White, House, Jinping).

de-national. Scheinwahl in Russland: Duma – "mehr als 50 Prozent Kriegstreiber" — 16 owners, 32 articles, published over 21 hours (Russland, Duma, Kremlpartei, Putin). Landtagswahlen: Wahlen in zwei Bundesländern – Wegweiser in der Merz-Krise? — 15 owners, 540 articles, published over 23 hours (Mecklenburg, Vorpommern, Berlin, Wahl). Wahlen in Berlin und Mecklenburg-Vorpommern: Kanzler und CDU suchen nach historischem Debakel Ausweg aus der Krise — 15 owners, 437 articles, published over 23 hours (CDU, Berlin, Mecklenburg, Vorpommern).

ru-domestic. Песков: Россия выступает за прочный мир, а не перемирие с Украиной — 18 owners, 142 articles, published over 12 hours (Песков, санкции, Трамп, зимы). Самарская область подверглась крупной атаке беспилотников ВСУ. Сбиты десятки дронов, повреждены дома и автомобили — 18 owners, 114 articles, published over 19 hours (Самарской, Федорищев, область, беспилотников). Семь человек пострадали при пожаре на судне «Триумф» у Камчатки — 17 owners, 47 articles, published over 19 hours (Триумф, Камчатки, судне, берегов).

ar-pan. عاجل.. ترامب في الأمم المتحدة: أعتقد أننا سنتوصل إلى اتفاق مع إيران مباشرة بعد الانتخابات الأمريكية — 13 owners, 48 articles, published over 22 hours (ترامب, عاجل, ماكرون, أمير). المغرب.. "الأصالة والمعاصرة" يتصدر الانتخابات البرلمانية — 13 owners, 24 articles, published over 20 hours (الأصالة, والمعاصرة, مقعدا, حزب). ترامب بعد بلقائه بالرئيس الصيني: أمور عظيمة ستحدث — 12 owners, 27 articles, published over 22 hours (الصيني, جين, ترامب, بينغ).

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 26%, 38%, 23%, 46%, 16%, 5% and 17%, in the order above.

169 events ran in more than one market this week, and 119 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:

Thursday 24 September

Tuesday 22 September

Monday 21 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, China Media with People's Daily and Rossiya Segodnya with TASS. The measure puts those pairs 1st, 2nd and 3rd of 47 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 1,724 headlines were rewritten there, 773 of them substantially — less than half the words survived — and the median rewrite landed 3.8 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 553 — 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.

• Al Jazeera — “Polls close in Russian wartime election with ruling party set to dominate” → “Ruling party dominates early results in Russia’s wartime parliamentary vote”
• Versant Media — “FAA halts flights to Newark and Philadelphia because of equipment issue” → “Hundreds of flights into Newark, New York, Philadelphia disrupted after Verizon fiber line cut”
• Scott Trust — “Briton due to face Cypriot court after tragic death of two-year-old son” → “Briton pleads guilty to ‘recklessly’ causing death of his son in Cyprus”
• Independent — “UK politics latest: Burnham set for first meeting with Trump at UN summit in New York” → “Burnham-Trump latest: US president says relations with UK better now than when Starmer was PM”
• Independent — “Rejoining EU single market and customs union would allow us to cut your taxes, Lib Dems say” → “Ed Davey promises income tax cut and a return to EU single market”
• Al Jazeera — “Syria’s al-Sharaa warns Israeli attacks endanger delicate post-war recovery” → “Syria’s al-Sharaa urges Israeli withdrawal in UN General Assembly speech”

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 37% 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 148 rewritten headlines and disappear from 106; words that hold a claim at arm’s length — so-called, alleged, reportedly — move in 20 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.

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.