Methodology
How Updat3 Works
Updat3 collects news from hundreds of outlets, groups related articles into single stories, and shows each outlet's political orientation so you can see who's covering what — and how. This page explains the mechanics behind what you see.
Outlet Orientation
How we rate each outlet on a left–right spectrum, show the mix of outlets covering a story, and flag when coverage is one-sided.
Source Collection
Where articles come from, how they're de-duplicated, and what makes a story eligible to appear in the feed.
Story Quality
How we score article text quality and decide when a story has enough multi-source support to publish.
Our editorial principles
No government is the neutral default
We treat every government as an actor with interests — including the US, UK, and other Western states. Their foreign policy framing is not our baseline.
Every story carries historical context
No story is published without a historical-context section. Its depth is tiered to the story: conflict, defence, politics, law, energy, climate and labour stories get the full causal chain back to its origin; health, science and markets stories a medium depth; technology, business, culture and sport a short, specific background. Every sentence must carry a verifiable anchor (a dated event, a named law, treaty, ruling or election, a named person in a named role, or a figure with its year); sentences without one are removed before publication, and a sampled fact-checker re-reads the anchored claims.
Context starts at the actual origin
We include historical context that goes back far enough to give the real causal chain, even when it implicates powerful actors.
The same word for the same action
We apply identical language to all parties. If one side's military operations are called "strikes", the same word applies to all sides.
Disagreement ≠ bias
Outlets can reach different conclusions from the same facts. An outlet's rating describes its usual political orientation — not whether its reporting is accurate, and not whether we agree with it.
Story images
Photographs on Updat3 are either public-domain works of U.S. federal agencies or Creative Commons files from Wikimedia Commons, each shown with its creator, licence and a link to the original file. A photograph of a person, place or institution that was not taken at the event is labelled “File photo”. When no rights-cleared photograph exists we draw our own locator map or editorial graphic instead. Locator maps are made with Natural Earth (public domain) naturalearthdata.com. Federal images are not endorsements by the agency shown.
Something wrong? Think an outlet is scored incorrectly? We review our bias map regularly. Tell us what's wrong — it goes to updat3news@gmail.com and is read by a person. To report a problem with a specific story, use “Report an issue” on that story's page.