This page sets out how a story reaches Parallax, in the order it happens, and the standards it has to meet on the way.
1. Reading the sources
We read the published feeds of newsrooms worldwide: international agencies and broadcasters, national outlets across several countries, and single-subject publications for sections such as technology, science and health. Every source is fetched with an identifying user agent, and we obey each site’s robots.txt. Where a publisher’s terms or robots file disallow us, we do not read them.
We take headlines, standfirsts and, for stories that reach publication, the article text, which is used to check the summary and then discarded on a retention timer. We do not republish article bodies.
2. Grouping reports of the same event
Reports are grouped by comparing what they are about, not by matching words. Two reports join the same story only when their meaning is close and they share the specific things a real event has in common: the same names, places and figures. This second check exists because similar-sounding headlines about different events are common, and getting it wrong would merge two stories into one.
A related problem is wire copy. Many outlets reprint the same agency dispatch almost unchanged, which looks like several outlets independently confirming something when it is one report printed several times. Near-identical reports are collapsed and counted once.
3. The two-source rule, and its exception
A news story publishes only when at least two independent outlets have reported it. That is the core of the site: the source count you see on every story is a real count of independent reports, after wire copy has been collapsed.
There is one deliberate exception. Features, meaning Style, Travel and Entertainment, do not work this way. Two publications do not independently write the same travel guide or the same review, so a second source is not available and its absence proves nothing. Those sections publish from a single outlet, and every such story is marked Single source and carries a note saying plainly that nothing in it has been checked against a second report.
4. Writing the summary
Each summary is written from the grouped reports and nothing else. There is no outside material, no carry-over from earlier stories and no house line to argue: the brief is a neutral account of what the sources say, and every claim in it has to survive the checks below.
This is the step most likely to go wrong, so it is the most heavily checked.
5. What stops a story publishing
Every draft passes four checks. Failing any one holds the story rather than publishing it.
- Grounding. Every figure and every named person, place or organisation in the summary must appear in at least one source. A figure that appears nowhere in the reporting is rejected outright.
- Source floor. The independent-source count must meet the threshold for that section.
- Cohesion. The grouped reports must actually be about one event, measured at the time they were grouped.
- Copying. A summary that reproduces a long run of words found in only one outlet has paraphrased that outlet rather than summarising the story, and is held. Language common to several reports is not copying. It is how the event is described.
A story that fails a check is set aside with the reason recorded. It does not appear later without that reason being resolved.
6. Sensitive subjects
Stories touching health, crime and elections are held for editorial review before they appear, regardless of how many sources carry them.
7. Photographs
Where a story carries a photograph, it comes from one of two places, and the difference is stated on the page.
- A photograph from the reporting outlet, credited to them. It shows the event.
- A file photo from a free-licence library, labelled as such. It illustrates the subject and does not show the event. We use these only for places and objects, such as a courtroom or a petrol station, never for an event, and only where the picture is from the country the story is about.
Photographs requiring attribution carry the photographer, the licence and a link to the original. We do not use images that carry another outlet’s masthead or branding.
8. Corrections and updates
A story that gains sources after publication is rewritten against the fuller picture and marked Updated. Where we get something wrong, the corrections policy says what we do about it.
The limits of the method
No summary is better than the reporting behind it. A source count records how many outlets published a story independently, which is not the same as independent verification: outlets can agree and still be wrong, and where that matters the original reporting is always one click away. Grouping is a judgement about whether two reports describe one event, and occasionally it joins stories that should be separate or separates one that should be joined.
If you find something wrong, tell us. It is the fastest way this gets better.
Last updated 13 Sep 2026