12,449 stories in a week — and half of them from five addresses

One week, 12,449 articles, 51 newsrooms. Written out like that the number looks generous: so many sources, so many voices, from everywhere. Then you sort the same list by source and the generosity falls apart. The five busiest sites — finance.yahoo.com, report.az, theguardian.com, apa.az and newsweek.com — filed 5,765 articles over those seven days. That is 46 per cent of everything. A reader scrolling the "latest" list is reading one in every two stories from the same five addresses.

First place is not close. finance.yahoo.com alone filed 2,232 articles: 17.9 per cent of the week, roughly every sixth item. Behind it come report.az with 1,124 (9 per cent), theguardian.com with 926 (7.4 per cent), apa.az with 777 (6.2 per cent) and newsweek.com with 706 (5.7 per cent). After those five the list drops away fast — bbc.co.uk 629, trend.az 562, aljazeera.com 561 — and the remaining 46 newsrooms split the other half between them.

The far end of the list says more. economist.com put 14 articles into the archive over the same seven days. bigthink.com 11, aeon.co 7, quantamagazine.org 4, longreads.com 3, and knowablemagazine.org just 2. The gap between the top and the bottom is about 1,116 times. One source writes a thousand times more than another, and both sit in the same list under the same word: new.

That gap is not laziness. Knowable Magazine publishes two long pieces a week because that is the job: read a subject for months, write it once. Yahoo Finance’s market wire files a new line every minute the exchanges are open. They are different trades. The problem is that a news feed measures both with the same ruler — time. In a list sorted by time the fast writer always wins, because that is the rule of the game.

The consequence shows up directly in the categories. The biggest category of the week is finance, with 3,049 articles. But 2,230 of them, roughly three quarters, come from a single source. "The world talked mostly about the economy this week" would be the wrong sentence. The right one is: this week one market wire typed more lines than anyone else, and we filed them under a category.

Azerbaijan is second with 2,579 articles, and here the picture is more honest: report.az, apa.az, trend.az and azernews.az together filed 2,572. That category is, almost exactly, the daily output of four local newsrooms. Then come world (2,338), sport (1,242), politics (1,172) and culture (851). Culture, usually the slowest thing to write, sits at the bottom of the list too.

There is a comfortable but wrong conclusion here: that five sources control the agenda. In fact nobody controls anything. Yahoo, the Guardian and report.az work with no knowledge of each other, and none of them is thinking about our list. What creates the ranking is not their intent but our sorting rule. A list ordered by time is, by its nature, a list belonging to the fastest machine.

This is also what keeping an archive is for. Hold 51 newsrooms in one table and something appears that no single newsroom can see: how much each of them talks. Read one site and its rhythm feels like the rhythm of the world. Put fifty-one side by side and you can tell whose rhythm it is.

The practical conclusion is simple. Reading news by time means voluntarily accepting a filter that treats the most prolific as the most important. That is why the stories section on this site is sorted differently: items there are ranked by how many independent newsrooms thought an event was worth filing on. That is not a perfect measure either, but at least it measures agreement rather than speed.

And one more thing worth remembering: to find the two articles knowablemagazine.org filed this week you have to scroll a 12,449-line list to the very end. They are there. It is just that the slowest writing is always at the bottom.