Methodology

We don't break news

We are never a primary source, and we do not claim to be first. The lead story on the homepage and each section front gets an original Rhyter Times summary, clearly attributed to the one outlet it's drawn from when only one outlet has reported it so far. When two or more independent outlets cover the same story, it gets the fuller treatment instead: a cross-referenced synthesis that draws only on what those outlets actually establish between them.

We cover systems, not incidents

A current event is the trigger, not the subject. Our question is “why is this happening” or “what does this mean,” not “this just happened.” We're interested in the institution, policy, or pattern underneath the headline.

Facts and speculation stay separated

Claims are attributed to their source (“according to,” “as reported by”) rather than asserted as our own, and attribution is not the same as verification. Where something is disputed or unconfirmed, we say so plainly instead of implying certainty.

We end on synthesis, not a verdict

Every piece closes with what is known, what is disputed, and what it means, not a conclusion we're asking you to adopt. Judgment is the reader's.

How we classify an outlet's political lean

Powers Perspectives and Coverage Gaps. This is not a proprietary bias-scoring algorithm, and we don't claim it is. It reflects general, widely-recognized public and journalistic consensus about each outlet's news desk, not its opinion section, the same kind of consensus reflected in independent research like Pew Research Center's media typology work. It's deliberately outlet-level, not article-level: we're not claiming every article from a given outlet leans a particular way, only that the outlet's general reputation does. Most of our sources, regional papers, trade press, and topical verticals, have no real left-right reputation to report honestly, and are correctly left unrated rather than guessed.

How we compute Viral Load

Powers Viral Load. We don't claim to measure virality across other platforms: X and Meta both stopped exposing public share-count data years ago, so any figure claiming to do that would be an estimate dressed up as a measurement. Instead we measure two things we can actually see from our own pipeline, honestly. Breadth: how many of our curated outlets are independently covering a story right now. Velocity: how much that outlet count grew in the last six hours. A story's score is its current outlet count plus three times its recent growth, so a story that's smaller but accelerating can outrank one that's bigger but has plateaued. The ranking covers a rolling 24-hour window, not a fixed daily reset.

The virality percentage isn't just today's stories compared to each other, it's each story's score compared against the peak scores of stories we've actually tracked over the last 60 days. That's what keeps a slow news day from making everything look artificially huge, and a genuinely enormous story on a busy day from getting buried by the day's average. The Breaking / Surging / Trending / Developing label is just that percentile split into plain-English bands. In the first weeks of this feature, before 60 days of real history exist, it falls back to comparing a story against that day's own stories instead, which we consider the honest option over a percentage that looks precise but isn't backed by enough data yet.