Week of 10–16 October 2026

Between 10 October and 16 October 2026 this project collected 106,440 articles and grouped them into 4,340 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, 4 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 looking for new press secretary after Katie Zacharia fired — 26 owners, 95 articles, published over 22 hours (Zacharia, press, Katie, secretary). Higher Energy Prices Pushed U.S. Inflation Up to 3.7% Ahead of Midterm Elections — 22 owners, 69 articles, published over 17 hours (inflation, September, prices, increase). Feds raid Rep. Ilhan Omar's home in D.C. as part of immigration probe — 22 owners, 53 articles, published over 12 hours (Omar, Ilhan, home, Rep).

uk-national. Burnham to use key UK-EU summit next month to seek new post-Brexit deals — 12 owners, 40 articles, published over 18 hours (Burnham, Brexit, Andy, closer). Burnham wants to ‘repair bridges’ between Trump and Zelenskyy — 11 owners, 24 articles, published over 22 hours (Burnham, Zelensky, Ukraine, Volodymyr). Ukraine’s allies vow to pressure Moscow after Trump-Putin diesel deal — 10 owners, 36 articles, published over 16 hours (Russia, ceasefire, Trump, Ukraine).

uk-regional. Yorkshire Wildlife Park zookeepers 'did all they could' to scare off tiger which attacked man — 4 owners, 54 articles, published over 22 hours (tiger, Wildlife, Park, Yorkshire). Hattersley serious incident LIVE updates as air ambulance lands at scene — 4 owners, 38 articles, published over 19 hours (Wilder, Chris, United, Sheffield). Man who threatened to rape PSNI officer jailed for eight months — 4 owners, 21 articles, published over 15 hours (breast, tolerate, diagnosed, cancer).

intl-state. Russian strike kills 12 in Zaporizhzhia after Trump eases diesel sanctions — 10 owners, 63 articles, published over 23 hours (diesel, Zaporizhzhia, Trump, Putin). Trump claims both Putin, Zelenskyy 'want to end' war but 'don’t know how to get there' — 10 owners, 46 articles, published over 22 hours (Ukraine, Trump, Kremlin, diesel). Ukraine accuses Elon Musk’s SpaceX of throttling Starlink terminals — 9 owners, 96 articles, published over 22 hours (Starlink, SpaceX, Kyiv, Russian).

de-national. Gegen Ukraine-Hilfen - AfD und BSW beschließen ersten gemeinsamen Antrag — 15 owners, 31 articles, published over 18 hours (BSW, Landtag, AfD, Sachsen). Sondierungsstopp in Berlin: Wer hat Angst vorm Linksbündnis? — 14 owners, 173 articles, published over 20 hours (Zuckersteuer, Sondierungen, Grüne, Berlin). Ukraine: Donald Trump fordert Machtwechsel in Kiew nach Diesel-Streit — 14 owners, 68 articles, published over 23 hours (Diesel, Trump, Deal, Putin).

ru-domestic. Суд в Казахстане арестовал на два месяца рэпера Navai — 19 owners, 39 articles, published over 11 hours (Navai, Казахстане, наркотиков, рэпера). Песков прокомментировал заявление Трампа об энергетическом перемирии — 17 owners, 190 articles, published over 24 hours (Песков, выборов, Путин, готов). Силы ПВО за ночь сбили 644 дрона ВСУ над регионами России — 17 owners, 166 articles, published over 23 hours (ПВО, автобус, беспилотников, Собянин).

ar-pan. 12 قتيلاً ومئات الجرحى في هجوم صاروخي استهدف مطار الملك خالد بالرياض — 16 owners, 140 articles, published over 22 hours (مطار, الملك, خالد, الرياض). الأردن: مقتل مواطن وإصابة 4 بهجوم الحوثيين على مطار الرياض — 15 owners, 146 articles, published over 24 hours (مطار, الرياض, الملك, خالد). تحالف دعم اليمن ينذر بإخلاء موقع في صنعاء تمهيدا لـ"عملية نوعية" — 14 owners, 59 articles, published over 18 hours (صنعاء, التحالف, اعتراض, الشرعية).

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 30%, 43%, 28%, 52%, 18%, 6% and 17%, in the order above.

162 events ran in more than one market this week, and 115 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:

Monday 12 October

Sunday 11 October

Friday 16 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 51 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 1,753 headlines were rewritten there, 826 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 598 — 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.

• Bloomberg — “EU’s Kallas Urges Trump to Sanction Russia and Shun Diesel Deal” → “Trump’s Russia Diesel Deal Aids Putin’s War, Europe Warns”
• BBC — “Tiger attack park closed for third day” → “Health and safety inquiry after fatal tiger attack”
• New York Times — “Trump Has Asked Kimberly Guilfoyle to Resign, White House Says” → “Kimberly Guilfoyle Resigns as Ambassador to Greece”
• Comcast — “Federal authorities investigate suspicious mailings sent to congressional and secretary of state offices” → “Feds investigate suspicious letters sent to lawmakers and election officials”
• BuzzFeed — “Teen Shooter Kills 4 At Oregon Elementary School Before Being Shot By A Witness” → “5 People Believed Dead Following Shooting At Oregon Elementary School, 2 Officials Tell AP”
• USAGM — “European Leaders Back Zelenskyy After Trump's Diesel Deal; Russia, Ukraine Continue To Trade Strikes” → “Trump Announces Energy Cease-Fire Between Ukraine, Russia As Countries Trade Strikes”

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 38% 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 177 rewritten headlines and disappear from 105; words that hold a claim at arm’s length — so-called, alleged, reportedly — move in 35 and out of 19. 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.