Week of 3–9 October 2026

Between 3 October and 9 October 2026 this project collected 107,934 articles and grouped them into 4,486 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, 0 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. Trump picks Katie Zacharia as next White House press secretary — 22 owners, 31 articles, published over 5 hours (Zacharia, press, Katie, Secretary). Mamdani, NYC officials give update on ICE shooting — 20 owners, 72 articles, published over 24 hours (ICE, shot, Mamdani, shooting). Nobel Peace Prize Goes to International Jurist Navi Pillay — 20 owners, 41 articles, published over 15 hours (Peace, Nobel, Prize, Pillay).

uk-national. Polanski insists he will carry on as Green leader despite by-election defeat — 14 owners, 64 articles, published over 23 hours (Polanski, Labour, Holborn, Pancras). Kemi Badenoch speech live: Tory leader promises to abolish inheritance tax on family homes — 12 owners, 47 articles, published over 17 hours (Badenoch, Kemi, speech, party). What is the Green Party's 'Zionism is racism' motion? — 11 owners, 25 articles, published over 16 hours (Zionism, motion, racism, Green).

uk-regional. Tragedy as 'missing' girl, 11, found dead in Midlands park — 5 owners, 49 articles, published over 19 hours (police, girl, van, body). Live updates as ASOS 'hacked' as customers receive eerie notification — 4 owners, 50 articles, published over 17 hours (Asos, customers, hacked, notification). Oxton house death 'non-suspicious' as probe into 'substances' removed by bomb squad continues — 4 owners, 43 articles, published over 20 hours (Ferris, Salford, Paul, police).

intl-state. Trump Announces Diesel Supply Deal With Putin Following Phone Call — 10 owners, 25 articles, published over 20 hours (diesel, Putin, Trump, supply). Five killed as Kyiv and Moscow trade strikes, Russia hits second bridge — 9 owners, 30 articles, published over 18 hours (bridge, Kyiv, strikes, Russian). US imposes sanctions on International Criminal Court, threatens to 'dismantle' it — 8 owners, 46 articles, published over 15 hours (Pillay, peace, Nobel, Navi).

de-national. Erster AfD-Landtagspräsident – so läuft die Sitzung heute ab — 18 owners, 146 articles, published over 21 hours (AfD, Anhalt, Sachsen, Rausch). Die CDU ist am Abgrund — 16 owners, 120 articles, published over 21 hours (Sachsen, Anhalt, CDU, AfD). Brasilien: Lula tritt in Stichwahl gegen Bolsonaro-Sohn Flávio an — 15 owners, 46 articles, published over 22 hours (Bolsonaro, Lula, Brasilien, Stichwahl).

ru-domestic. В Черногории задержали создателя телеграм-канала канала «Рыбарь» Михаила Звинчука — 20 owners, 226 articles, published over 16 hours (Черногории, Рыбарь, Звинчука, канала). Задержанный ФСБ житель Тамбова признался в подготовке подрыва автомобилей — 19 owners, 28 articles, published over 1 hours (ФСБ, Тамбова, сотрудников, подрыв). Пострадал водитель бензовоза. Последствия атак на российские регионы — 18 owners, 144 articles, published over 22 hours (ПВО, Собянин, беспилотников, летевших).

ar-pan. ترأست لجنة أكدت إبادة غزة.. نافي بيلاي تفوز بنوبل للسلام 2026 — 14 owners, 91 articles, published over 17 hours (المحكمة, بيلاي, الجنائية, نافي). ترامب يعلن إجراء محادثة ناجحة مع بوتين ويؤكد: أسعار الديزل ستنخفض بفضل الاتفاق مع روسيا — 14 owners, 34 articles, published over 18 hours (بوتين, الديزل, الروسي, ترامب). التحالف يعلن تدمير صاروخ باليستي للحوثيين شمال الرياض — 13 owners, 53 articles, published over 22 hours (عدن, مطار, اليمنية, أبها).

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 31%, 52%, 27%, 56%, 22%, 8% and 20%, in the order above.

198 events ran in more than one market this week, and 144 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:

Friday 9 October

Tuesday 6 October

Friday 9 October

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 50 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 1,852 headlines were rewritten there, 858 of them substantially — less than half the words survived — and the median rewrite landed 4.2 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 612 — 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 — “Houthis blame Saudi air strikes as loud blasts rock Yemen's capital Sanaa” → “Houthis claim strike on oil facilty near Riyadh, accuse Saudi forces of pounding Yemen's capital”
• Rossiya Segodnya — “Russia's Strikes on Kiev and Other Regions are Response to Actions by Ukrainian Leadership — MoD” → “Russia to Intensify Strikes on Ukrainian Military Infrastructure After Zelensky's Statement — MoD”
• Versant Media — “Brazil election headed to runoff, projection shows, as Bolsonaro lead narrows” → “Bolsonaro beats expectations in Brazil presidential vote, will face Lula in runoff”
• News Corp — “Spain’s Prime Minister Sanchez Calls Snap Elections After Housing Protests” → “Spanish Leader Calls for Elections, Riding Wave of Anger Over Housing Costs”
• Fox Corp — “'American Idol' contestant Caleb Flynn faces in-laws after conviction for wife’s murder” → “'American Idol' alum Caleb Flynn weeps as daughters ask him why he killed their mother, vow not to visit him”
• Comcast — “Jim Bakker, TV pastor who served time for defrauding followers, dies at 86” → “Jim Bakker, whose PTL ministry fell to scandal and fraud, dies at 86”

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 43% 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 135 rewritten headlines and disappear from 104; words that hold a claim at arm’s length — so-called, alleged, reportedly — move in 19 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.