About

howsthe.world reads the world's news every day and tells you, country by country, whether the coverage was better or worse than usual, and why.

How it works

Every day we read GDELT, a free public database that logs news events from outlets around the world in over 100 languages. A day is a UTC day, and every page says which day it shows.
For each country we take the tone of that day's events, giving more weight to events that more outlets covered.
We compare that tone with the country's own last 90 days. The result is one of five words: tense, uneasy, steady, calm or upbeat. A country is only ever compared with itself, never with its neighbours.
To explain the word, we pick the most-covered articles and an AI model (Claude Haiku) groups their headlines into up to three stories. It may only use facts from those headlines, and a sentence with a number that is not in them is thrown away. Every story links to its source.
The world gets its own word the same way, from every country's news pooled together. It colours the small globe in our logo. The daily report adds a short summary written by AI from the stories on that page.

It is not a survey of how people feel. It measures the tone of news coverage about a country, much of it written abroad.
It is not a news site. We link to the outlets that did the reporting.
It is not exact. Small countries get little coverage. On thin days we smooth over a week and say so, and a few countries have too little news to read at all.

A daily question for everyone, once the site has 2,000 visitors a day: one tap, no account, results by country. Votes are never stored with anything that could identify you.
What things cost, measured in minutes of work: fuel and currency first, more later.
A small widget other sites can embed.
More languages.