How newscrate works

newscrate doesn't write news. It finds reporting and official alerts for a place, puts them side by side, and links you to the original every time. The only AI on the site summarises what it's shown and explains background when you ask for it. Both are labelled.

Checking a place

Search a city, share your device location or type in coordinates, then press Check. Nothing loads before that, and nothing from a previous visit is remembered. The only exception is a link someone shared with you, which carries its own location.

The search area depends on what you searched for: about 40 km around a town, 150 km around a region, and the whole country for a country. You can change it with the Radius menu. For a country, hazards and weather are measured from its capital, not its geographic centre (the centre of the US is in Kansas).

A place's results are cached for 20 minutes and shared. If someone else checked the same place a few minutes ago, you get their results instantly, and the page tells you when they were fetched.

News

Stories come from a live search of Google News and Bing News at the moment you check. That reaches small local papers no fixed list of feeds could. The place name is searched as an exact phrase together with its country, so Springfield, Illinois doesn't pull in every other Springfield. Where the local press mostly writes in another language, that language's edition of Google News is searched too. Those headlines carry a language tag (NL, AR…), and the AI summary translates them. A short country-wide search always runs alongside (up to 8 stories, tagged "Nationwide"), because in a capital the national picture often matters as much as the local one.

When several outlets cover the same story, it appears once with the other outlets listed underneath, even when they word it differently. No single outlet can fill the whole card. Stories are ranked by how much they matter, not just by time. Security, politics, unrest, disasters, the economy and the courts rank above sport, celebrity and lifestyle pieces. Trusted local, investigative and UN sources get extra weight, as do stories several outlets are covering. Each story loses weight as it ages, so an older one has to matter a lot more to stay on top. Section pages ("All News", "Announcements") and republishers like MSN and Yahoo are left out.

Trusted sources for each country

Every country has a short list of outlets we search directly: its main independent and public-service newsrooms, English-language editions where they exist, and exile or independent outlets where the domestic press isn't free. Examples are Meduza and The Moscow Times for Russia, Radio Dabanga and Sudan Tribune for Sudan, and The Irrawaddy for Myanmar. Their stories rank first, and the AI summary gives them more weight. These searches go through Google News, and through Bing News whenever Google refuses. The Status page shows if either search engine is failing.

Investigative newsrooms

Every check also searches specialist investigative outlets for the place and its country: Bellingcat, OCCRP, ICIJ, Forbidden Stories, Lighthouse Reports, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Airwars, The Insider, InSight Crime, ARIJ, Global Witness, The Sentry, ProPublica and The Intercept. Their work takes weeks and stays relevant longer, so it's included for up to 60 days (other news, 14), capped at four stories and tagged "Investigative". The briefing presents these as investigations and says when they were published.

State media, UN reports and travel advisories

What a government says matters, especially if you're visiting. For about 50 countries, official outlets (TASS for Russia, Xinhua for China, SUNA for Sudan and so on) are searched as a second voice. They're capped at four stories, ranked below independent coverage and always tagged "State media". The summary attributes their claims ("According to state media…") and never states them as fact.

Situation reports from UN agencies and aid groups, via ReliefWeb, appear alongside the news. In conflict and disaster zones they're often the most reliable information available. Official travel advice is shown at the top: the UK Foreign Office's (whether it advises against all travel, or all but essential travel, to the country or parts of it) and the US State Department's advisory level (1 to 4), each linking to the full text. The two governments don't always agree, and that's worth knowing. Both are checked every few hours.

Before you go

A short card of practical basics for the country: the local time; its currency and today's rate against the pound, dollar and euro (official reference rates from Exchange Rate API, updated daily; in some countries, such as Sudan, Libya or Lebanon, the cash rate on the street can be very different); whether an internet outage is being reported; and links to the official pages for help. The UK Foreign Office's "Getting help" page for each country lists its emergency numbers and the British embassy, so the card links there rather than listing numbers that could go out of date.

Offline and Lite mode

Your last five place checks are saved in your browser, on your device only. If you lose your connection, checking one of those places again shows that saved copy, clearly marked with when it's from. The same saved copy lets the page tell you what's changed when you check a place again: a line at the top counts the new stories and alerts and flags any change in the official travel advice, and new stories are marked New. Lite mode leaves out the globe, ads, social chatter and prediction markets, for slow or metered connections. It switches on by itself when your browser's data saver is on or the connection is very slow, and the switch at the bottom of the page turns it on or off.

Lean labels

Each outlet carries a label: Left, Lean Left, Centre, Lean Right or Right. The News card shows the overall mix at the top. Government-run outlets are marked State-run instead of being placed on the scale. Outside the US and UK, lean is judged against that country's own politics, so "Lean Left" for an Argentine paper means left of centre in Argentina. These are our own judgements, based on widely cited public consensus about each outlet, not licensed ratings. Treat them as a rough guide. Most wire services and public broadcasters are Centre.

There's no separate conflict card. Research datasets on conflict are published a month or more after events, which is too late to be useful here. Current violence and unrest reach you through the news, UN reports and advisories above.

Following a place

The 📡 Follow button gives each place its own RSS feed. Paste it into any feed reader and the place's news arrives on its own: the same stories as the News card, the latest AI briefing when one has been written, and any US travel advisory at level 3 or 4. Every item links to the original. Feeds refresh about every 20 minutes and share the site's cache, so following a place costs nothing extra. Tick "Include Chatter" to add social posts too, each marked [Unverified].

Chatter

What people are posting about the place right now, from four networks: the day's top posts in the place's Reddit community (or the country's), and posts naming it on Bluesky, Mastodon (its hashtag) and Lemmy from the last two or three days. Social posts are often the first sign that something is happening, like road closures, a police cordon or a power cut, but nobody has checked them, and in some places they're where rumours and propaganda spread fastest. So Chatter has its own card, is never mixed into News and is never used by the AI briefing.

Filtering: posts must actually name the place. Adult or graphic content, replies, reposts, spam (giveaways, promo codes, hashtag walls) and posts nobody engaged with are dropped. There's one post per author. Posts about something happening (police, protests, closures, outages, weather, prices) rank above holiday photos and restaurant chat. The card shows a balanced mix, at most four posts from each network, newest first, and says when a network didn't answer. Results are cached for 15 minutes.

Anything not in English, whether a news headline or a post, gets a Translate button that opens it in Google Translate.

Local Outlook

A short briefing written by Google's Gemini from the stories and alerts on the page, and nothing else. It leads with the most important recent development and ranks what affects safety and daily life (unrest, disasters, strikes, transport) above sport and celebrity news. It says when older stories happened rather than presenting them as current, names places rather than giving distances, and makes no predictions. Every point links to the reports it came from, so you can check it.

"Deep dive" is the longer version. It reads the fuller excerpts of every report on the page, picks the two to five stories that matter most, and for each explains what happened, the background to it, and where outlets' coverage differs, such as independent press against state media. It ends with what it means for someone there, what to watch for next, and what the reporting doesn't tell you. Recent events come only from the reports. The background can draw on the model's general knowledge and is labelled "Context". It uses a larger Gemini model than the short briefing, and falls back to the smaller one when the larger one is busy. Follow-up questions work the same way.

"Background on…" works differently. It asks the model for context: how a situation started, who's involved, what a visitor should know. That draws on the model's general knowledge, which can be out of date, so it's marked as such every time. Only the day's headlines are treated as current events.

Natural hazards

Earthquakes of magnitude 4.5 and above from USGS. Wildfires detected by satellite through NASA FIRMS, with detections within 5 km of each other grouped as one fire. Cyclones, floods, droughts, volcanoes and tsunamis from GDACS, with its green/orange/red alert level. Alerts are removed once they're no longer active, and everything is gone after 30 days. Hazard data is refreshed while people are using the site: earthquakes at most every 30 minutes, outages and GDACS alerts every hour, wildfires every two hours.

Transit & infrastructure

Flight emergencies: aircraft within about 460 km of the place that are broadcasting an emergency transponder code right now (7700 emergency, 7600 radio failure, 7500 hijack), from the community flight tracker adsb.lol, with a link to the live flight map. Your browser asks adsb.lol directly when you check a place, because free flight trackers refuse requests from cloud servers like ours. Internet outages from Cloudflare Radar. These are reported for a whole country, and an outage could be a government shutdown or a cut cable. The alert only tells you connectivity was disrupted, not why.

Weather

Current conditions, today's high and low, rain chance, UV index, air quality, sunrise and sunset, all in the place's own local time. The data comes from Open-Meteo. For the night sky (stargazing conditions, the moon, ISS passes), the card links to our sister site skycrate.cc.

Prediction markets

Odds from Polymarket and Kalshi on markets that name the country as a whole word ("US", "American" and so on count for the United States, but "house" and "music" don't). The odds are what traders are paying, not our forecast. Markets that have closed or have traded less than $1,000 are left out. So are near-copies: a dozen versions of the same question for different districts or margins show as one, the busiest. At least two Kalshi markets are shown when there are any, since Polymarket's much larger volumes would otherwise crowd them out. Each market shows how much has been traded and when it closes. Odds are refreshed while people are using the site, about hourly for Polymarket and every two hours for Kalshi.

Background feeds

We also read 20 international news feeds around the clock, a few every 15 minutes so each is checked about once an hour, chosen for a mix of regions and political leanings. They power the site search (Ctrl/Cmd+K) and /feed.xml. We keep the headline, a short excerpt and the link for 90 days, never the full article.

Source	Section
BBC News	World
NPR	World
The Guardian	World
DW	World
France 24	World
The Economist	World
Washington Examiner	World
National Post	World
Fox News	World
AllAfrica	World
The New Humanitarian	World
Al Jazeera	Geopolitical
Foreign Policy	Geopolitical
The Diplomat	Geopolitical
The Verge	Tech
Ars Technica	Tech
NASA	Science
Nature News	Science
The Guardian	Business
CNBC	Business

/feed.xml can be filtered by section, country or source, for example /feed.xml?category=geopolitical or /feed.xml?country=Ukraine. Countries are tagged by matching place names in the headline, which is imperfect. A thin feed for a country usually means the matching missed stories, not that nothing happened there. The Status page shows whether each source is currently working.

Public API

The data behind the site is available as read-only JSON, with no key needed and CORS open. It runs on a small free plan, so please cache what you can.

Endpoint	Returns
/api/local?lat=&lon=	Everything the homepage shows for a point. Optional: radius (km), q (place name for the live news search), country, scope (local/region/country).
/place.xml?lat=&lon=	A place as RSS, taking the same parameters as /api/local. Add chatter=1 to include social posts.
/api/chatter?name=&country=	Chatter posts for a place.
/api/weather-snippet?lat=&lon=	The Weather card.
/api/hazards	Earthquakes, wildfires, GDACS alerts, internet outages. (Flight emergencies are looked up live from adsb.lol in the browser.)
/api/markets	Prediction markets. Optional country.
/api/fx	Daily ECB exchange rates via Frankfurter. Optional base.
/api/search?q=	Search the background feeds.
/api/feed-preview	/feed.xml as JSON, same filters.
/api/geocode?q=	Place search.
/api/nearest-place?lat=&lon=	The nearest town (15,000+ people) to a point.
/api/status	Source health.

Get in touch

Spotted a mistake, or know an outlet that should be on a country's list? Use the contact form.