Who files first

Every story here is grouped with the other coverage of the same events, which means we can see the order newsrooms arrive in. This is what 8,620 filings across 41 outlets look like when you count them.

Read the small print before you enjoy this. The order outlets arrive in is taken from the timestamp each one puts on its own feed. We checked those against the live feeds and they are stable about 97% of the time, but a re-edited story can move, and when it moves it moves later. The archive starts on 2026-09-21, so this is a few days of behaviour, not a verdict on anybody's newsroom. Only 175 of 5,075 stories were covered by more than one outlet at all, and speed is only ranked for outlets that were in at least 15 of them.

None of this says whether a newsroom is any good. It does not know whether a story was accurate, fair, or worth filing. Being late is often what being careful looks like.

First to the story

Of the stories where another outlet also filed in writing, how often this one was earliest. Written filings only: a video carries its upload time, which lands after the newsroom had the story, so outlets we read only on YouTube are not ranked here.

What the score means, and how it is worked out

The number is an adjusted first-rate: out of the stories where another outlet also filed in writing, the share where this one was earliest, pulled toward the average until an outlet has enough contests to have earned its own figure. Being first on your only contested story says nothing, so it scores like the average rather than like 100.

The average across every outlet is about 11.1, and that is the number to read everything against. Nothing here can approach 100 and nothing should: on a typical story several newsrooms file within the hour and only one of them can be first. The average moves as more stories arrive, so these figures will drift.

It measures one narrow thing: who tends to get there first. Nothing else.

1 Axios 45.4 first on 35 of 62
2 NBC News 35.7 first on 36 of 87
3 Reason 16.8 first on 8 of 41
4 Washington Post 16.6 first on 14 of 78
5 National Review 15.2 first on 4 of 21
6 Fox News 12.9 first on 6 of 44
7 France 24 12.8 first on 9 of 68
8 The Independent 10.4 first on 9 of 88
9 The Guardian US 10.3 first on 10 of 99
10 Los Angeles Times 10.2 first on 3 of 31

Filed the most

Sheer output: every article and video we picked up.

1 Al Jazeera 708 filed
2 Fox News 627 filed
3 The Guardian US 608 filed
4 The Hill 531 filed
5 CBS News 473 filed
6 The Independent 455 filed
7 Newsweek 438 filed
8 NBC News 438 filed
9 New York Times 404 filed
10 BBC News 382 filed

Went it alone

How much of their output nobody else we read covered. High is not better or worse, it usually means a beat the rest of this list does not work.

1 Ars Technica 99% · 66 of 67
2 The Atlantic 97% · 58 of 60
3 Newsweek 94% · 411 of 438
4 The Economist 93% · 109 of 117
5 Politico 91% · 20 of 22
6 Fox News 85% · 533 of 627
7 Al Jazeera 84% · 598 of 708
8 South China Morning Post 75% · 256 of 341
9 Sky News 67% · 38 of 57
10 National Review 63% · 41 of 65

Counting is not judging. None of this measures whether the reporting was any good, and being late to a story is often what being careful looks like. The full source list has every outlet we read.