Methodology reference
Publisher Authority Tiers
Every publication CurrentWire reads sits in one of three authority tiers. Tiers describe journalistic standing and reach — never political orientation. This page is the reference for what they mean, what they are worth, and what they deliberately do not do.
Source authority is one of the six signals described on the methodology page. This page covers the tier system behind it. For the publications currently appearing in CurrentWire coverage, see Sources.
The three tiers
| Tier | Weight | Authority points (of 20) | Publications configured |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier A | 1.00 | 20.0 | 14 |
| Tier B | 0.70 | 14.0 | 21 |
| Tier C | 0.45 | 9.0 | 8 |
- Tier A — Major wire services, public-service broadcasters and national publications.
- Tier B — Strong regional and specialist publications.
- Tier C — Smaller credible publications — and any publisher CurrentWire holds no tier for.
The configured count is the number of publications with a tier on file. It is not the number of publications CurrentWire will show: any publisher appearing in a feed is read and indexed, whether or not it is on the list.
Only the strongest publication in a story counts
A story’s authority score is set by the single highest tier among the publications covering it. If one Tier A wire service is in the list, the story takes the full 20.0 authority points; a second and a third Tier A do not raise it further.
That is deliberate. How many publications covered a story is a separate signal with its own 20 points — see what coverage breadth measures. Letting tier count breadth as well would pay large outlets twice and let a handful of them outweigh everything else.
Tier also decides whose headline you read
A story page shows one headline and one summary, chosen from the reports it groups. That choice is made by tier first, then by completeness — a report carrying both a summary and an image — and then by recency. Every other report stays listed underneath with its own headline, timestamp and link. Tier never removes a report from a story; it only decides which one represents it.
How a publication is matched to a tier
- By domain first. Leading subdomain labels are stripped one at a time until a match is found, so
feeds.npr.org,edition.cnn.comandwww.bbc.co.ukresolve to the same publications as their bare domains. - Publishers serving several domains are one publication. BBC News is matched on bbc.com, bbc.co.uk and bbci.co.uk; ABC News on abcnews.go.com and abcnews.com. One publication, one tier, one display name — this is also what stops a feed’s channel title appearing in the interface as though it were a separate outlet.
- Then by name. If no domain matches, the publication name from the feed is tried.
- Otherwise Tier C. Unlisted does not mean untrusted. It means CurrentWire holds no assessment of that publisher’s standing, so it receives the smallest of the three weights rather than being excluded from the site.
Press releases keep the domain but lose the credit
A press release published on a Tier A outlet’s site is still the issuer’s own communication. The outlet’s tier says nothing about the editorial scrutiny the text received, because it received none. So when a story is classified as a press release, its authority input is multiplied by 0.5: a Tier A release scores 10.0 instead of 20.0.
Press-release stories are also kept out of every curated selection unless real newsrooms picked the story up, and can never carry the BREAKING label. Those rules are set out in the editorial standards.
What tiers are not
- Not a bias rating. Tiers describe reach and journalistic standing. CurrentWire publishes no ideology or bias score for any publication and uses none in ranking.
- Not an accuracy score. A tier is not a claim that a publication is right, and a lower tier is not a claim that one is wrong. Nothing on this site rates the correctness of a publisher’s reporting.
- Not a partnership. Reading a publisher’s public feed is aggregation. It implies no relationship, endorsement or agreement in either direction.
- Not a filter. Tier C reports appear in Latest, in search, on their publisher’s own page and in the sitemaps exactly like any other. Tier affects one of six signals, worth at most 20 of 100 points.
Related references
- How CurrentWire ranks the news — all six signals and their weights.
- What coverage breadth measures — the other half of the source question: not who, but how many.
- How duplicate stories are merged — how one event’s reports become one story.
- Sources — publications currently represented, grouped by tier.
A publication placed in the wrong tier, or named incorrectly? The corrections process explains how to tell us.