Every editorial product asks to be trusted. This one publishes its scoring instead. The board below is the method that seats every story on the Wire; when it changes, the version number changes, and the change is logged here.
DETECT — poll the roster's public feeds (every 60s) → RESOLVE — cluster items: one story, many sources → TRIAGE — score and tag each cluster → SEAT — assign tiers with hysteresis and a bump budget → PUBLISH — every open browser re-seats within seconds.
The score is GRAVITY: corroboration 25 · velocity 20 · consequence 25 · power 15 · freshness 15. The full math — with the rubric for consequence and power, and the sliders to re-rank the live board yourself — is published at /gravity.
| Tier | Gate |
|---|---|
| FLASH | Score ≥ 85 and ≥ 5 independent owners and under two hours old. Machine-raised flashes are labeled machine-seated until the desk confirms. A flash with no new development steps down on its own within 45 minutes. Orange appears on this site for FLASH and for nothing else. |
| BULLETIN | Score ≥ 70, held across consecutive sweeps. |
| URGENT | Score ≥ 55. |
| DEVELOPING | Score ≥ 40. |
| BRIEF | Everything else the wire carried. Ages off the board within hours. |
Hysteresis: promotion requires clearing a threshold and holding it across sweeps; demotion requires falling clearly below it. Bump budget: at most six re-seats per sweep beyond new arrivals. The board moves like a newsroom, not a stock ticker.
| Tag | Definition |
|---|---|
| CONFIRMED | Carried by 4+ independent owners including at least one primary-wire-grade source. |
| REPORTED | Carried by 2–3 independent owners. |
| DEVELOPING | One owner so far. Watch the corroboration count. |
| DISPUTED | Reserved for the desk — applied by hand, logged in the story's biography. |
These tags describe the state of coverage — a fact the system can stand behind. The desk's actual judgments live in the Briefing, the Spin Room, and the Ledger.
NPR · BBC · PBS · Guardian Media · NYT Co · Axel Springer · Nexstar · Cox · Fox Corp · MediaDC · News Corp · Comcast · Disney · Paramount · Qatar Media
Headlines and excerpts of at most ~25 words link out to their sources, always attributed. The raw, unranked intake is public — open the Ticker at the bottom of the Wire and compare it with the seated board whenever you like.
Every tier change, headline normalization, and desk intervention is written into the story's public biography. When the desk pins, re-seats, or stands down a story by hand, the biography says seated by the desk. The override shows its work too.
| GRAVITY v2.0 | GRAVITY: consequence + power join the signals; the Lobby split; weights published and reader-tunable. |
| v1.0 | First published method. Corroboration counts owners, not domains. Orange reserved for FLASH. |