How Fastrack reads the news.
Everything on the site is built from three measurements: what happened, who covered it, and from where. Here is exactly how each one works.
01Clustering
Fastrack ingests headlines and articles from 200+ US and international outlets around the clock. Coverage of the same underlying event is grouped into a single story cluster — one news event is one entry in your feed, not fifteen. Clusters update continuously as new reporting lands; the timeline on every story page shows how coverage developed, beat by beat.
02The bias scale
Every source carries a rating on a seven-point scale. Ratings describe an outlet's overall editorial perspective, not any individual article.
A story's own position is the centroid of the coverage it actually received — normalized by side, so the bigger side's volume doesn't drown out the smaller one.
03Coverage bars
The bar on every story shows the share of its sources rating left, center, and right — each side measured against how many sources of that side we track overall.
04Factuality
Separately from bias, each source carries a factual-reporting grade. A high-factuality outlet can sit anywhere on the political scale — the two axes are independent, and we show both on every source.
05Underreported
When one side's coverage share falls far below its normal baseline, the story is flagged as Underreported — news you're likely missing if you read only one side. The Underreported feed collects them.
06Corrections
Clustering and classification are automated, and occasionally wrong. When we mis-group, mis-rate, or mis-headline a story, tell us: corrections@fastrack.newsCopy. Fixes ship with a timestamp.