Week of 26 September – 2 October 2026

Between 26 September and 2 October 2026 this project collected 107,530 articles and grouped them into 4,437 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, 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. Hochul and James vow to investigate Cornell sexual assault case — 19 owners, 72 articles, published over 23 hours (Cornell, Hochul, rape, James). Trump launches AI-powered America.gov website ahead of meeting with big tech leaders — 19 owners, 66 articles, published over 14 hours (website, leaders, Trump, Gov). Netanyahu says a pilot on a FlyDubai flight stabbed another and apparently tried to crash the plane — 18 owners, 72 articles, published over 17 hours (flight, pilot, Israel, plane).

uk-national. Burnham sets out plan to reform triple lock to pay for social care — 16 owners, 104 articles, published over 22 hours (triple, lock, Burnham, speech). Does Britain want to rejoin the EU? Here’s what the polls say — 11 owners, 32 articles, published over 18 hours (Brexit, rejoin, Burnham, Andy). Andy Burnham vows to fight next election with NHS-style social care plan — 11 owners, 19 articles, published over 13 hours (care, social, Burnham, election).

uk-regional. Burnham sets out plan to reform triple lock to pay for social care — 4 owners, 70 articles, published over 15 hours (Burnham, Andy, triple, lock). Mossley crash LIVE as police tape off street after car ploughs into house — 4 owners, 41 articles, published over 17 hours (assaulted, police, car, flu). Tragic police update after body of newborn baby girl found on North Wales shoreline — 4 owners, 33 articles, published over 19 hours (baby, Bangor, shoreline, girl).

intl-state. Russian strikes in Kyiv region kill three people and injure eight over past 24 hours — 8 owners, 51 articles, published over 18 hours (Kyiv, Russian, building, injured). What happened on diverted Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv? — 8 owners, 45 articles, published over 23 hours (Flydubai, flight, Tel, Aviv). US dismisses Iran's Hormuz proposal as 'cynical' as Trump expects more talks — 8 owners, 22 articles, published over 23 hours (Iran, Hormuz, proposal, Trump).

de-national. Pflegeversicherung: Koalition bringt Pflegereform ins Kabinett — 15 owners, 77 articles, published over 17 hours (Pflegereform, Kabinett, Kinderlose, Linnemann). Merz warnt vor russischem Angriff auf Deutschland und Nato — 15 owners, 28 articles, published over 20 hours (NATO, Westfälischen, Friedenspreis, Merz). Nach massiver Kritik: Warum sich Spahn wieder zurückzieht — 14 owners, 198 articles, published over 23 hours (Spahn, Haushaltsausschuss, Klopp, Jens).

ru-domestic. Самолет Flydubai, подавший сигнал о ЧП, совершил посадку в Саудовской Аравии. На борту подрались пилоты — 20 owners, 199 articles, published over 17 hours (Flydubai, Тель, Авив, борту). Силы ПВО сбили за сутки 768 беспилотников ВСУ — 19 owners, 87 articles, published over 18 hours (поразили, Минобороны, ПВО, ВСУ). В результате падения самолёта в Амурской области погибли шесть членов экипажа — 19 owners, 48 articles, published over 9 hours (Амурской, тренировочного, шесть, учебно).

ar-pan. ماذا لو دخلت طائرة «فلاي دبي» مخطوفة إلى إسرائيل؟ — 14 owners, 111 articles, published over 24 hours (دبي, فلاي, طائرة, أبيب). ترمب يرفض خطة الـ7 أيام الإيرانية — 14 owners, 44 articles, published over 23 hours (هرمز, مضيق, رفض, ترامب). عاجل.. وسائل إعلام إسرائيلية: نتنياهو يجري اتصالا برئيس الإمارات عقب حادثة طائرة “فلاي دبي” — 13 owners, 164 articles, published over 19 hours (دبي, فلاي, طائرة, التحالف).

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%, 46%, 30%, 57%, 19%, 6% and 17%, in the order above.

187 events ran in more than one market this week, and 134 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 1 October

Wednesday 30 September

Tuesday 29 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 1,791 headlines were rewritten there, 842 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 582 — 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.

• Newsweek — “OpenAI Warns US Government Agencies of Rogue Activity” → “What OpenAI Going Rogue in US Really Means”
• Nikkei — “Appeals court overturns ban on contentious Northern Ireland parade” → “Northern Ireland in tense stand-off as protests block Orange Order parade”
• Independent — “Major incident declared near RAF Fairford as bomb squad called out and multiple men arrested” → “RAF Fairford: Terror police ‘investigate Iran link’ to suspected bomb plot near airbase”
• Lebedev — “Calls grow to rethink state pension triple lock as Labour searches for £18 billion for social care programme” → “Will Burnham scrap the pension triple lock? PM to call for 'honest conversation' at Labour Conference speech”
• Fox Corp — “Lindsay Clancy's push to investigate holdout juror could be paused as defense, prosecutors agree to adjourn” → “Lindsay Clancy's 'Shooter McGavin' unloads on 'hoodie-wearing lawyer' amid war of words over holdout juror”
• Al Jazeera — “Trump, top tech firms sign accord to ‘self-police’ AI development” → “Trump, tech bosses sign voluntary pact pledging ‘robust’ AI safeguards”

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 44% 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 163 rewritten headlines and disappear from 114; words that hold a claim at arm’s length — so-called, alleged, reportedly — move in 26 and out of 20. 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.