About NewsOverlap
NewsOverlap reads the front pages of hundreds of outlets across 130 countries and ranks stories by how many of them independently ran it — then shows you which countries' press is covering a story, and which are silent.
Most news apps rank stories by what one newsroom decided to lead with, or by what you clicked last time. NewsOverlap ranks by independent corroboration instead: a story that many unaffiliated outlets, in many countries, chose to run on their own front pages is treated as important. A story only one outlet is pushing is not.
The useful consequence is the inverse view. Once you can measure how widely a story travelled, you can also see where it didn't — the stories big in one country's press and invisible everywhere else, and the international stories your own country's press hasn't touched.
Where the data comes from
Two sources, both of them designed to be read by third parties:
- The GDELT DOC 2.0 API — an open dataset that indexes global news coverage and links out to publishers.
- A curated list of publishers' own RSS feeds — the feeds outlets publish specifically so others can syndicate their headlines.
What we read, and what we don't
From RSS we read three things and no more: the headline, the link, and the publication date. Never the article body. Every item on this site links back to the publisher's own page, and that is the only place the article itself can be read.
This is the same posture as any RSS reader, and it is deliberate: it keeps the project clear of the EU press publishers' right, and it means we are sending readers to publishers rather than substituting for them. We don't scrape, and we don't ingest feeds an outlet hasn't published for syndication.
Who makes it
NewsOverlap is an independent project, not owned by or affiliated with any publisher, and it takes no funding from the outlets it ranks. Outlet quality tiers are set by hand and applied uniformly; no outlet can pay to be ranked higher, because there is nothing to pay for.
Corrections and questions: [email protected].