How we choose the news

Almost everything you read here is progress: a fact that moves a line, measured and attributable. Alongside it we publish two smaller, declared quotas. Something of note is not progress and does not pretend to be — it is simply good to know. Research is a study that reveals how something works.

A sporting win is zero-sum: someone loses. A prize recognises work rather than changing anything. A museum reopening does not alter the life of someone living elsewhere. Under the progress rubric these stories are rejected, and rightly so — but throwing them out altogether would be priggishness, not rigour.

So we keep them separate and we say so. Next to every story in the second register you find the word Of note in place of the stage: for those, only three things count — is it true, is it genuinely interesting, does it matter to more than a handful of people. We do not ask the other three questions — durability, agency, not zero-sum — because they would make no sense.

Research is the newest of the three, and it comes from a problem we could not solve: a study is not an event. If we learn that visiting museums is associated with a younger physiological age, nothing in the world has changed — and yet it is the most interesting thing of the day. We measure those on three different questions: how well the study design holds up, how far it overturns common intuition, how much it touches your life. The first counts for almost half, and below a certain bar we do not publish anyway: a study of twenty people with no control group stays out, however beautiful the story.

Neither minor register ever opens the home page, and neither may take more than three of its twelve slots. The first thing you see on arriving is still progress.

Every story is scored on six questions: how many people it touches, whether the gain outlasts the headline, how verifiable it is, whether somebody did something or it merely happened, whether one party's gain is another's loss, and whether it makes you want to do something.

That score is then multiplied by how far the thing has **actually got**. A measured fact is worth twice a preclinical result and three times an announcement, and that is not a nuance: with these numbers a mouse study and a corporate promise cannot clear the bar even by answering all six questions well. It is why you will not find a cancer cure here every Tuesday.

Above the score sit fifteen reasons for rejection that apply regardless: the bright side of an ongoing tragedy, an announcement passed off as a result, advertising dressed as news, nationalism, an unreliable source, an old story served as new. Any one of them stops the highest-scoring story of the day.

Then a person looks at it. The rubric chooses what to propose, the newsroom decides what to publish, and the two do not always agree: we measure how often they disagree, and that number will tell us whether this selection could one day do without us.