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 8,896 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 180 of 5,198 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, 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 44.1 first on 34 of 62
2 NBC News 33.8 first on 35 of 90
3 National Review 19.5 first on 6 of 22
4 Washington Post 17 first on 15 of 81
5 Reason 16.4 first on 8 of 42
6 France 24 14.5 first on 11 of 71
7 Fox News 12 first on 6 of 48
8 Los Angeles Times 11.9 first on 4 of 32
9 The Guardian US 10.1 first on 10 of 101
10 New York Times 9.8 first on 8 of 84

Filed the most

Sheer output: every article and video we picked up.

1 Al Jazeera 733 filed
2 Fox News 642 filed
3 The Guardian US 621 filed
4 The Hill 540 filed
5 CBS News 484 filed
6 The Independent 473 filed
7 Newsweek 449 filed
8 NBC News 444 filed
9 New York Times 426 filed
10 BBC News 398 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 The Economist 94% · 109 of 116
4 Newsweek 94% · 421 of 449
5 Al Jazeera 85% · 622 of 733
6 Fox News 84% · 541 of 642
7 Politico 84% · 21 of 25
8 South China Morning Post 76% · 274 of 359
9 Sky News 65% · 40 of 62
10 Ben Shapiro 63% · 17 of 27

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.