$ clstr stats --since 2026-04-10
145 days of news,
measured.
Frozen on September 1, 2026. Methodology.
QUERYABLE
The data behind these numbers, over a free news API and an MCP server for agents. No card needed.
00 / TWO WORDS FIRST
What is a cluster? What is a situation?
A cluster is one real-world news event.
When 40 outlets cover the same earthquake, ruling or match, those 40 articles are gathered and deduplicated into one cluster: one event, not 40 copies of one headline. Each cluster carries how many distinct sources stand behind it.
A situation is the storyline those events form.
Related clusters link into one situation over weeks or months, with a maintained summary and a full timeline: not just what happened, but how it developed. The Ukraine-Russia war is one situation holding more than 1,500 clusters.
So the ladder every number on this page climbs is: articles → clusters → situations.
01 / THE FUNNEL
Roughly 12 articles are published for every thing that actually happened.
Since April 10, 2026. 145 days. Base: the 787,464 clusters with two or more sources.
ARTICLES READ
9,220,844
about 63,592 a day
CLUSTERS
787,464
11.7 articles each
SITUATIONS
113,142
7 clusters each
9,220,844 articles collapse into 787,464 clusters, and those clusters gather into 113,142 situations, 63,910 of them still active. Roughly one article in 81 is attached to a storyline you could still be following next month.
02 / STORY LIFESPAN
A headline burns out in three days. The story underneath does not.
Two populations, two windows. Clusters: the 787,464 with two or more sources. Situations: the 49,232 that have finished.
Only 1.2% of clusters keep growing past day three. Follow the same news one level up and the picture inverts: 81.8% of situations were still developing after day three, 65.4% after a week, and 13% ran longer than a month.
333,828 of 787,464 clusters took no further article after day one.
6,404 situations ran longer than a month.
The longest of the eight in section 08 has run 141 days.
03 / NEAR-VERBATIM COPIES
About 11,043 times a day, an article appears that is a near-verbatim copy of one already published.
Measured over the 24 days to August 16, 2026.
Each square is one article in a hundred.
9.6%
265,030 of the 2,753,794 articles read in the last 24 days matched something already in the pipeline closely enough to be dropped before it ever reached a reader.
This is the strict count. It only fires when the headline and the summary are both a 98-percent-plus semantic match to an article published within two days. Rewrites of the same wire copy are not in this number: they are handled later, by clustering.
Measured across 84,215 distinct source domains in 175 countries.
04 / SIGNIFICANCE
Only 0.07% of news clusters rate as exceptional.
Since April 10, 2026. 145 days. Base: the 783,112 multi-source clusters scored so far.
Every cluster is scored 1 to 10 by a language model reading the multi-source summary, weighing how large the event is, who it affects and how much of it is new. As a rough ladder: a 2 is a league result or a regional appointment, a 5 is a national story with real stakes, an 8 is a mass-casualty disaster or a major escalation between states. 8 or above is exceptional, which almost nothing is.
512 of the 783,112 scored clusters reached 8 or above: 504 at 8 and 7 at 9. Nothing has scored 10. The middle of the distribution is where almost all news lives, which is the honest version of what a normal day looks like.
05 / PEOPLE
One person appears in 3,246 distinct clusters. The next five most-mentioned people combined reach 2,508.
Measured over the 38 days to September 1, 2026. Counted as distinct clusters, not article volume. No filter: these are the most-mentioned people of any kind.
- 1. Donald Trump 3,246
- 2. Narendra Modi 581
- 3. Vladimir Putin 536
- 4. Javier Milei 494
- 5. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva 461
- 6. Benjamin Netanyahu 436
- 7. Claudia Sheinbaum 436
- 8. Elon Musk 416
Donald Trump shows up in roughly 85 separate clusters every day. Nobody applied a filter to this ranking: it happens that ranks 2 through 6 are all heads of state or government, and the five of them together still reach only 2,508 clusters. Elon Musk is the 8th most-mentioned person in world news at 416 clusters, behind Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin, Javier Milei, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Benjamin Netanyahu.
06 / THE WEEKLY RHYTHM
Friday is the loudest day of the news week: 14% more articles per hour than Wednesday.
Since April 1, 2026. Hours are UTC.
BUSIEST HOUR
07:00 UTC
3,146 articles
QUIETEST HOUR
00:00 UTC
2,166 articles
BUSIEST DAY
Friday
3,073 per hour
QUIETEST DAY
Wednesday
2,701 per hour
The news never actually stops. Even at 00:00 UTC, the quietest hour of the day, an average of 2,166 articles an hour keeps arriving.
THE BRIEFING
Nobody reads 63,592 articles a day.
Three times a week, the top situations and what moved in each one, built by the same pipeline every number on this page was measured from.
One click to confirm. Unsubscribe anytime.
07 / WHERE THE NEWS IS WRITTEN
The world writes its news in a wave, and 08:00 UTC is the crest.
Volumes measured July 24, 2026 to August 31, 2026, hourly rhythm from the week to August 31, 2026. Hours are UTC. 582,330 articles in an average week, across 162 countries. Location is the publisher's, not the subject's.
Each dot is roughly two degrees of land, and it brightens with how much its country is publishing in that hour. Run a full week and the bright band sweeps west with the working day: Asia first, then Europe, then the Americas. Summed across all seven days, 08:00 UTC is the loudest hour with 32,435 articles, and 01:00 UTC the quietest with 16,623, a gap of 95%.
Publishing volume by country, one week, hours in UTC.
TOP PUBLISHERS THIS HOUR
Friday 08:00 UTC, the busiest hour of the average week
- 1. Germany 591 articles · 11.5%
- 2. Italy 529 articles · 10.3%
- 3. Greece 232 articles · 4.5%
- 4. Poland 219 articles · 4.2%
- 5. Türkiye 208 articles · 4%
The map plays an average week: how much each country publishes on each weekday is measured over the full window from daily counts, and one sampled week supplies the hour-by-hour rhythm inside each day. A country enters the map at 50 articles for the week or more, and the country on an article is where its publisher sits, so a story about one place written somewhere else lights up the writer's country, not the subject's.
08 / SITUATIONS THAT NEVER CLOSE
The longest-running of these has been updated for 141 straight days.
Since April 10, 2026. 145 days. 8 hand-picked situations, not a ranking. Each one links to its live page.
- US-Iran Conflict: Economic Warfare and Maritime Volatility 1,827 clusters · 5,517 sources · 141 days
- Ukraine-Russia war: AI drones, economic strikes, and escalation 1,542 clusters · 3,615 sources · 141 days
- 2026 FIFA World Cup: economic, digital, and leadership aftermath 1,459 clusters · 4,159 sources · 122 days
- European heatwave and drought crisis intensifies 1,041 clusters · 4,893 sources · 133 days
- Venezuela earthquake recovery and political transition 775 clusters · 4,261 sources · 70 days
- Lebanon-Israel conflict: military escalation and diplomatic deadlock 661 clusters · 2,273 sources · 103 days
- Argentina Milei reforms: recession, debt, and political fray 529 clusters · 1,284 sources · 134 days
- DRC Ebola outbreak reaches record scale and death toll 396 clusters · 3,078 sources · 106 days
Every one of these is a live page you can open right now and read from the first cluster forward.
09 / TWO STORIES, ONE EVENT
143,173 times, what looked like two stories was one.
Since June 2, 2026, when the merge log opens.
CLUSTERS MERGED INTO ANOTHER
143,173
One event often gets covered from angles far enough apart that the pipeline starts two separate clusters for it: a first report and a detail that lands an hour later under a different headline. As more coverage arrives the two converge, the pipeline recognizes them as the same event and merges them, keeping one record with every source attached and the old links still working. That has happened 143,173 times since June 2, 2026, about 1,600 a day.
PER DAY
1,556
since June 2, 2026
10 / MOST COVERED CLUSTERS
The most widely covered single cluster drew 1,893 distinct sources.
Since April 10, 2026. 145 days. Ranked by distinct sources across the 787,464 clusters with two or more sources.
- US‑Iran war escalates as Trump orders new strikes and Hormuz blockade 1,893 sources · July 10, 2026
- Dolly Parton dies at age 80 after battle with cancer 1,767 sources · August 25, 2026
- Argentina defeats England 2-1 to reach World Cup final 1,653 sources · July 14, 2026
- FIFA drops World Cup stake‑sale plan after UEFA boycott threat 1,540 sources · July 29, 2026
- Ceuta migrant surge prompts Spain to deploy troops and sparks EU border tensions 1,510 sources · July 27, 2026
- Colombia earthquake strikes Chocó, causing mass casualties and state of emergency 1,463 sources · August 9, 2026
- Lionel Messi announces retirement from Argentina national team 1,401 sources · August 30, 2026
- U.S. Imposes New Forced‑Labor Tariffs on 60 Trading Partners 1,374 sources · July 22, 2026
11 / WHERE THE ATTENTION GOES
United States is attached to 20% of all clusters that carry a country.
Since April 10, 2026. 145 days. Base: the 607,955 clusters with at least one country tag. A cluster can carry more than one, so shares total above 100%.
- United States 20%
- Italy 8%
- Brazil 7.1%
- Germany 7%
- United Kingdom 6.1%
- Spain 5.8%
- India 4.8%
- France 4.1%
- Mexico 4%
- Türkiye 3.4%
- Japan 3.2%
- Argentina 3%
- Poland 3%
- Greece 2.7%
- Canada 2.6%
COUNTRY EXPLORER
What did the news look like from one country?
Pick a country. The panel below is built from the same measurement, filtered.
Two windows in here, and every tile says which one it uses. Cluster figures run since April 10, 2026. Article figures cover the last 24 days only: article rows age out of the database, so they cannot reach further back.
The explorer needs scripting switched on. Every figure it shows is a filtered view of the rankings printed above, so nothing here is gated behind it.
METHODOLOGY
How these numbers were produced
Cluster. One real-world news event: every article
covering the same happening, gathered and deduplicated into a single item.
Situation. An ongoing storyline that groups related
clusters over time, with a maintained summary and a timeline.
What gets counted. Every cluster figure on this page counts only clusters with two or more distinct sources, the ones a reader can actually open on CLSTR. A cluster that never attracts a second source is working state: it is never displayed, and it is deleted after three days. Counting those would pad every base population with rows nobody can see.
How copies are detected. An incoming article is dropped as a copy only when its headline and its summary both reach 98% semantic similarity with an article published within two days of it. That is a deliberately strict bar, so the 9.6% figure is a floor, not a ceiling. Looser reprints and rewrites are not counted here: they are absorbed later, when clusters are assembled.
The articles-per-cluster ratio is approximate. It divides every article read by the count of displayable clusters, and some of those articles sat in single-source clusters that were later dropped. Treat 11.7 as an order of magnitude, not a precise ratio.
Windows differ, and each stat says which it uses. The article counter reaches back to April 10, 2026. Article rows age out of the database after about a week, so the coverage and entity rollups keep roughly a month of detail: duplication, source counts and person mentions are measured over that shorter window and labelled accordingly, including inside the country explorer, where article tiles cover the last 24 days and cluster tiles run since April 10, 2026. Nothing on this page mixes two windows inside one number.
Counts are floors. Ingest gaps, provider outages and retries all subtract. Nothing here is extrapolated or modelled: every figure is a count of rows that exist, or an average of such counts.
Significance scores are model output. Each cluster is scored 1 to 10 by a language model reading the multi-source summary, weighing the scale of the event, who it affects and how much of it is new. In practice the ladder reads roughly like this: 1 to 2 covers routine local items, a fixture result or a minor appointment; 3 to 5 is the everyday middle, national stories with real stakes; 6 to 7 marks major national or cross-border events; 8 and 9 are reserved for events of global consequence, a mass-casualty disaster or a serious escalation between states; and 10 has never been awarded. It is a judgement, not a measurement, and the individual scores carry noise. The aggregate shape is what this page reports. Scores are written at summarization, so 99.4% of displayable clusters carry one: the remainder is the fresh tail, still waiting for its summary, and it is left out of the base rather than counted as a zero.
CLSTR reports what sources are saying. It does not check whether they are right. Nothing on this page is a claim about the accuracy of any reporting.
Frozen on September 1, 2026 from the production database. The page runs no query: the figures are compiled in, so a number cited elsewhere still matches what is shown here.
CLSTR: Monitor the situation.
Everything above is a by-product. The product is the other side of it: 63,910 active situations, each one a page that carries the whole arc, so you never lose the thread on the 65.4% of storylines still developing a week later. Follow them here, or run the same pipeline yourself: it ships as a REST API and an MCP server your own tools can query.