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 The first counts for almost half, and below a certain bar we do not publish anyway: a study of twenty people with no control group stays out, however beautiful the story.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.

Under every headline there are five squares. They say one thing: how consistent that story is with the method you have just read. The more filled squares, the wider the margin by which the story cleared the rubric.

• Consistent with the method across the board: measured, durable, verifiable.
• It passes, with some give — a less solid source, a smaller effect.
• Borderline: we kept it, but it is the first one we would drop.
• No measure at all, only a dash: this story is here by our own choice, bypassing the rubric. That happens with artificial intelligence and innovation, where the method would reject almost everything for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the story. When you see an empty track, you know a person is answerable for it, not a score.

We write the number nowhere, and that is not laziness: a score on the page would invite an argument about the ranking instead of about the fact. The squares tell you how far to trust it; the rubric above tells you why.

from 78 eligible to open the day

from 62 publishable on the home page and in a section

from 50 section queue only

below 50 rejected