Newsroom Metrics
What this newspaper published, who read it, and what they thought of it. Updated live.
We ask other institutions to publish their numbers, so we publish ours. Everything below is generated from the same database that serves the site; nothing is rounded in our favour. Counts are server-side and anonymous — we run no third-party analytics and set no tracking cookie.
Reporting vs. argument
The wall between news and opinion is only meaningful if you can see how much of each we make.
How the front page is ordered
No editor places the lead by hand. Every story eligible for the front is scored on the parts below, the total decides, and the weights are printed here because a newspaper that ranks its own stories in secret is doing the thing this one exists to complain about. The reshuffle is drawn from today's date (2026-10-07), so the front is a new front each morning and the same front all day.
| Part | Weight | What it rewards |
|---|---|---|
| desk | 1 per point | The desk's own rank for the story, one to a hundred. |
| hook | 7 | Per device in the headline: a number, a turn, a voice, a name, a claim. |
| figure | 12 | It carries a diagram. |
| reply | 9 | Somebody answered back, and we printed it unedited. |
| coverage | 5 | It says how others covered the same thing, and what we left out. |
| documents | 4 | Per document cited from the Vault, up to three. |
| unverified | 6 | It says what we could not establish. |
| readers | 18 | Its read rate — readers per day since it ran — against the best on the site. |
| fresh | 22 | Filed in the last two days; less inside a week; fading over four months. |
| marquee | 10 | Per marquee theme it is plainly about, up to two: the theories our readers came for. |
| rotation | 12 | A daily reshuffle, drawn from the date, so the front is new each morning and steady all day. |
Output by desk
Reader verdicts
Readers rate every story loved / not sure / hated. We publish the total, including the stories that were hated.
Language
Clause 10 of our standards bans loaded adjectives and judgement verbs from straight news. A rule nobody measures is a wish, so a script counts them on every ingest and prints the result here whether or not it is flattering.
| Stories | Words | Loaded adjectives | Judgement verbs | Per 10,000 words | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reporting | 340 | 255,522 | 13 | 34 | 0.51 |
| Argument | 43 | 23,409 | 1 | 4 | 0.43 |
Every hit, with its story
sinister× 1 — You May Not Tell Your Own Board What You Heard reportingadmitted× 1 — The Air Force Forged The Dulce Papers. The Floors Are Still There. reportingclaimed× 1 — The Examiner Mentioned The Secrecy Act. The Applicant Vanished. reportingsinister× 1 — Eleven Times They Scheduled The Gold Count. Nine Times They Didn't. reportingclaimed× 1 — A Camera Went Down 611 Metres Under Khafre. It Came Back With Stairs. reportingadmitted× 1 — They Burned The Files And Kept The Receipts reportingoutrageous× 1 — They Really Do Fire Lasers Into The Sky. It Makes One Dot. reportingchilling× 1 — This One Is True. They Met In Geneva And Shortened The Bulb. reportingadmitted× 1 — Somebody Picked The Loans, Then Bet They Would Fail. reportingclaimed× 1 — He Made Them Up, Made Money, And Kept The Letters. reportingsinister× 1 — Every Night The World's Money Stops For Eleven Minutes reportingclaimed× 1 — They Filed The Paperwork. The Stated Aim Was Cheap Housing. reportingadmitted× 1 — For 2.25 Seconds The Building Fell As If Nothing Was Under It reportingconceded× 1 — For 2.25 Seconds The Building Fell As If Nothing Was Under It reportingconceded× 1 — Thousands Remember The Photograph. The Article Does Not Mention One. reportingclaimed× 2 — The Navy Released Four Seconds Of Ninety-One. The Redaction Is The Crosshairs. reportingclaimed× 1 — Twenty-Two Meetings, No Minutes. The Group Is Officially ‘A Conversation.’ reportingexplosive× 1 — Sweden Protected A Lake Monster For Nineteen Years. One Sentence Ended It. reportingclaimed× 2 — Bought In A Lot Of 1,900 Patents. Lapsed For An Unpaid $1,600. reportingadmitted× 1 — Item 14 Has Been Carried 412 Times. Deciding It Would Need A Quorum. reportingclaimed× 1 — One Sound File, Seven Countries. Nine Of The Rest Were Machines. reportingsensational× 1 — Three Texts In Eight Hours. The Lieutenant Asked For The Second One Himself. reportingsinister× 1 — The County Insured Itself Against Rainmaking. Clause 7 Excludes Rainmaking. reportingsinister× 1 — Cheyenne Mountain Closed Its Doors For Real Four Times In Sixty Years reportingclaimed× 1 — It Was Not Subliminal. Eleven People Wrote In To Say They Could See It. reportingclaimed× 1 — The Freezer Was Moved. The Work Order Is Dated Fourteen Months Earlier. reportingclaimed× 1 — Ninety-One Humanitarian Licences Were Issued. Four Banks Would Send The Money. reportingclaimed× 4 — The Agency Paid $18,400. The Province Paid $1.14 Million, Without Query. reportingsinister× 1 — 914 Names, 340 Beds, And A 1962 Assumption Nobody Revisited reportingclaimed× 1 — They Found Life Under Four Kilometres Of Ice. Then They Found The Tank. reportingsinister× 1 — He Asked Twenty-Nine Times Before Anyone Answered. The Mission Library Had The 1925 Issue. reportingclaimed× 1 — Forty-One Of Forty-Seven Ur Objects Match One Southern African Orebody reportingdamning× 1 — Nabil Attia Corvo, Driller, Who Lost Ninety Metres Of Rod Under Khafre reportingadmitted× 5 — Twenty-Six Minutes Of Ritual, Three Hours Of Dinner, One Catering Invoice. reportingclaimed× 1 — A Village Lost 300 Homes. Forty-One Generators Were Burning Silver Iodide Upwind. reportingclaimed× 1 — He Said 66 Men Died Under That Mesa. We Found 41 Of The Funerals. reportingadmitted× 1 — The CIA Burned The MK-Ultra Files. They Forgot To Burn The Receipts. reportingsinister× 1 — An Engineer Ran The Official Collapse Model 240 Times. It Never Fell. reportingadmitted× 1 — You Are Not Brave For Printing Corrections, You Are Just Slow argumentdamning× 1 — The Archons Were Not Powerful. They Were Middle Management. argumentconfessed× 1 — Paser Accused Pewero. The Commission Opened Ten Tombs And Found Nine Sealed. argumentconceded× 1 — Two Sons, One Founder, No Will: The Enlil–Enki Dispute As A Family Firm argumentclaimed× 1 — 'You Took The Warning Off Because It Was Ugly, Not Because It Was Wrong' argument
The checker is naive: it counts a banned word inside a quotation exactly as it counts one in our own prose. Every reporting hit above is a source saying a thing is not sinister, which the script cannot tell and we are not going to teach it to, because a checker that forgives us in cases we define is not a checker.
Who catches our mistakes
A reader wrote in on 8 August to point out that our corrections archive is largely a record of other people finding our errors, and asked us to publish the in-house share. The managing editor agreed in print. Here it is, and it stays here whatever it does.
5 of 17
| Found by | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| A reader | 7 | 41% |
| This newspaper | 5 | 29% |
| The subject of the story | 3 | 18% |
| A source in the story | 2 | 12% |
Corrections by desk
Rate, not count. A desk that files more will correct more; a desk at zero is either very careful or not being read closely, and we do not assume the first.
| Desk | Stories | Corrections | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Signal | 11 | 1 | 9% |
| Deep History | 50 | 4 | 8% |
| The Republic | 27 | 2 | 7% |
| The Sky Desk | 16 | 1 | 6% |
| Culture | 19 | 1 | 5% |
| Off-World | 65 | 3 | 5% |
| Suppressed Science | 25 | 1 | 4% |
| The Body | 33 | 1 | 3% |
| Shadow Governance | 52 | 1 | 2% |
| Cryptids | 24 | 0 | 0% |
| Money & Mechanisms | 20 | 0 | 0% |
| Obituaries | 16 | 0 | 0% |
| Opinion | 25 | 0 | 0% |
Bylines
| Reporter | Stories | Words | Corrections |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ambrose Teague | 61 | 49,738 | 3 |
| Dr. Perpetua Nkemelu | 55 | 45,027 | 4 |
| Marcus Oyelaran | 49 | 38,217 | 2 |
| Loretta Sung | 34 | 25,673 | 1 |
| Dr. Ilse Vantongeren | 28 | 21,459 | 1 |
| June Halloway | 28 | 20,160 | 2 |
| Sal Brindisi | 26 | 18,244 | 0 |
| Harriet Kwon-Massey | 20 | 14,415 | 0 |
| Ray "Sunshine" Pell | 16 | 11,480 | 1 |
| Gilbert Ames | 15 | 9,989 | 0 |
| Marguerite Lyle | 13 | 9,503 | 0 |
| Ozzie Vance | 10 | 827 | 0 |
| Dev Rajagopal | 9 | 5,454 | 1 |
| Nadia Ferreira-Ost | 7 | 3,361 | 1 |
| Bett Nakagawa | 3 | 2,239 | 0 |
| Nell Okonkwo-Baird | 3 | 181 | 0 |
| Rue Halvorsen | 2 | 221 | 0 |
| Verity Ashcombe-Doyle | 2 | 1,210 | 0 |
| Father Emil Kastrup | 1 | 648 | 0 |
| Wendell R. Frost | 1 | 885 | 0 |
Most disliked
There is no editorial reason to publish this list and every reason not to. It is here because a ratings widget whose results are only shown when they flatter the paper is not a ratings widget, it is decoration.
- We Gave A 4,000-Year-Old Strike To Two Arbitrators. Both Called It Unlawful.
- We Hired An Astronomer To Break The Orbit. Nine Dates Fit Anyway.
- He Named An Element Before It Existed. Then It Existed.
- $21,400 Left A Treasury Account In May 1955. Nobody Recorded What It Bought.
- Theodora Nnaji-Halcrow, 88, Wrote The Appeal Procedure And Won The Only Appeal.
- The Provenance
- We Tested The Heater Against Forty Years Of Storms. It Was Switched Off.
- We Checked 4,142 Frames Against Their Exposure Logs. Seven Should Show A Star.
Most read
- A Camera Went Down 611 Metres Under Khafre. It Came Back With Stairs.
- A Clay Tablet Logs 18 Tonnes Of Missing Gold And One Excuse.
- He Said 66 Men Died Under That Mesa. We Found 41 Of The Funerals.
- The Air Force Forged The Dulce Papers. The Floors Are Still There.
- A Building-Maintenance Code Is Carrying $2.31m. Nobody Will Say For What.
- Congress Concluded There Were Two Gunmen. It Has Never Withdrawn It.
- For 2.25 Seconds The Building Fell As If Nothing Was Under It
- We Bought 41 Flight Lines. Two Teams Reprocessed Them Blind. Both Found A Ceiling.
- They Searched 120,000 Square Kilometres For MH370. It Is 1,100km Away.
- A Mine Bought 2,290 Metres Of Rope For A 620-Metre Shaft.
- He Named An Element Before It Existed. Then It Existed.
- Fourteen Detectors Found The Same Eight Shafts. And One We Got Wrong.
- One Man Spent Four Years Proving 211 Tablets Were Read Wrong.
- Forty-One Of Forty-Seven Ur Objects Match One Southern African Orebody
- The Sentence That Started The Nibiru Panic Is Just Boilerplate.