How Today On Earth works
What you are looking at
A map of where the world's news is pointing right now. Each glow is a place that articles published in the last 24 hours are about. Brighter means more articles. That is all it means. It is not a map of what matters, and it is not a map of what happened; it is a map of coverage.
Where the articles come from
Every article comes from the GDELT Project, an open dataset that monitors news websites around the world in more than 100 languages and publishes what it found every 15 minutes. We read two of its feeds: the English feed and the translated feed, which covers articles written in other languages. We do not choose outlets. If GDELT saw it, it is here.
How a place is chosen for an article
GDELT lists the places each article mentions. We take the first place that is more specific than a whole country: a city, a region, a landmark. Articles that only mention countries are counted in the totals but are not drawn anywhere, because a country's centre is not where anything happened. The header tells you how many articles were left unplaced for this reason.
Places are grouped into hexagonal cells about 100 km across, so "Paris" and its suburbs glow together.
What the numbers mean
- Articles
- Distinct URLs in the window.
- Outlets
- Distinct website domains.
- Countries
- The countries those outlets are based in, from GDELT's own list of news domains by country. Unknown outlets count as unknown, not as any country.
- Languages
- The language the article was written in, as GDELT recorded it.
- Tone
- GDELT's tone score for the article, from negative to positive. We show it as a small mark, never as a word.
How "hot" is decided
Brightness is the article count on a logarithmic scale, squared so that only the busiest places reach white. Nothing about the articles' content feeds into it: not what they say, not which outlets wrote them, not what we think. Places with heavy media presence (Washington, London) will usually be bright; that is a fact about coverage, and we show it rather than correct it.
A second view, "vs. normal", appears once at least three complete days of history exist. It compares each place's current count with the median of its own daily counts over the last seven days, so a quiet place lighting up stands out and a place that is always busy does not. The brightness is log2((articles + 1) / (normal + 1)) scaled so that eight times normal is full brightness; the floor for "normal" is 3 articles so that tiny places do not explode. Places that are not in the current snapshot are shown with the ordinary brightness and no ratio; a place with no history at all counts as new, with a normal of zero.
Stories
Inside a place, articles are grouped into stories using only what GDELT already tagged for each article: the people, organisations and themes it mentions, plus the words in its title. The headline shown for a story is the title of one of its articles, chosen because it overlaps most with the others. We never write or edit a headline. Articles that fit no group are listed below, unfiltered.
What this site does not do
- It does not rank, recommend or summarise.
- It does not host articles or videos. Links go to the outlet. When an outlet embedded a YouTube video, we show its title and outlet as a plain card; nothing is requested from YouTube until you press play, and the player is YouTube's privacy-enhanced one.
- It does not know what is true. A place can glow because of a rumour.
- It does not see everything. GDELT misses outlets, geocodes wrongly sometimes, and sees more of the English-language web than any other. Dark areas mean no coverage was found, which is not the same as nothing happening.
- It has no editor and no feed. What you see is the same for everyone.
Replay
The scrubber under the map replays the last 24 hours in 15-minute steps. Each step is a snapshot of the same rolling window at that time.
Freshness
A new snapshot is built every 15 minutes. The header shows the time of the one you are looking at, in UTC. Right after a restart the window is shorter and the header says so.
Earthquakes
An optional layer draws earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 and above from the last 24 hours, straight from the United States Geological Survey's public feed. It is off by default, and nothing is requested from USGS until you turn it on. Rings are sized by magnitude; they are not part of the news heat and never affect it.
Data, code, attribution
The site is open source. Map outlines are from Natural Earth (public domain). News data is from the GDELT Project, used under its open terms with attribution. Earthquake data is from the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program.