About
The news, translated into human impact.
Every day the world publishes tens of thousands of news stories. The Impact Digest reads the record of all of them and asks one question: what did the news say happened to people? How much of it was about people being harmed, where, in which parts of life, how the coverage felt, and the help and hope within it — measured the same way every day, for every country.
Why this exists
Behind every story counted here are people. We hope the numbers make you look closer, care — and perhaps become part of the help and hope.
- News stories are not the same as the people experiencing the events.
- The amount of coverage a country receives doesn't necessarily reflect the amount of human suffering there.
- The language used to describe harm can tell us something about how the news is framed. Read across thousands of stories, it can also point to suffering the counts alone don't show.
- What goes unreported matters, too.
What we count — and what we don't
- Stories, not people. Every number here is a count of news coverage. It is not a count of victims, and it is not a measure of suffering. Most of what happens to people is never reported at all.
- Each story once. A story carried by hundreds of sites counts once.
- Each country against its own usual. Some countries are always in the news more than others, so a country is compared with its own recent coverage, not ranked by volume. A country with only a few stories is never allowed to top a list on them alone.
- Feelings from language. They come from the words of thousands of stories at once, never from one.
- No headlines, no outlet names, no article text. We keep a link to each story and our own tags. The link opens the story on its publisher's own site. Older links can stop working when a publisher moves or removes a story; the count stays, because it was made when the story was live.
What each page shows
- Today — the day in one sentence, the places the news pointed at most (each card says why), how the day felt, and four maps: the emotional weather, where the biggest events happened, where harm was most of a country's news, and where the news was warmest.
- Countries — every country, its share of news about people being harmed, how it moved, its key events and its neighbours.
- Feelings — anger, grief, fear and warmth in each country's news, against the world's and against its own usual.
- Trends — how each measure moved over days, weeks or months.
- Archive — every day we hold, in a calendar.
- Weekly briefing — the week in seven lines, on the site every Sunday.
- Your countries — follow up to 5 countries with a free account. The bell at the top lights up when their news changes, and they have their own part in the weekly briefing on the site.
How the places on Today are picked
Every day, each country is compared with its own usual coverage. A country is picked when something in its news stood out against that usual — more harm, a disaster or outbreak, protests, or a strong feeling. Bigger and more of these come first; a country with only a few stories cannot lead on them alone.
The four at the top each show a different part of life, so one kind of harm cannot fill the front. A country that ranked high but shares a part of life with one already shown is not dropped: it opens the list of more places below. Each card says, in plain numbers, why its country is there.
Why we do not print death tolls
We count how many stories report people killed, injured, displaced or arrested. We do not print the numbers of people those stories give: read by machine, a figure is too often an older total, an anniversary or a background line rather than that day's toll. For the toll of any event, open its stories.
Places and disputed areas
Places come from the news itself, so a story is sometimes filed where it was mentioned rather than where people were affected. Disputed areas are drawn and counted as our map draws them, in line with the United Nations' depiction: Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as Palestine. Kashmir — the parts administered by India and by Pakistan — is counted as a place of its own, because its status has not been agreed.
How to read the numbers
How to read these numbers
- What we measure
- How the world's news covered people being harmed — and the help and hope within it — not how much harm happened. Every number is about news coverage. Stories outside what we track can still be about people; we do not claim to find every one.
- Stories
- Each news story is counted once, however many sites carried it. A story is about people being harmed when it reports people killed, hurt, displaced, arrested, falling ill and the like, or is mostly about such harm.
- A share: of every 100 stories (a country's, or the world's), how many were about people being harmed. Shares can be compared across countries and years; totals cannot (see "Over the years").
- "Usual"
- The same measure over the 30 days before the day or period you are reading.
- "Against the world"
- The same measure in the world's news over the same days.
- Feelings
- How often words of anger, grief, fear and warmth appear in the stories about people being harmed, read over whole days and countries, never one story. Shown in words: "about twice as angry as the world's". Fear is the weakest of the four. Feelings describe the language of the coverage, not how people felt.
- Tone of words
- Whether the words were harsher or warmer than neutral. "Harsh wording" on a story is about its language, not a verdict on the story or the event.
- Help & hope
- Stories about people being harmed that also carry peace efforts, aid and relief, people freed or reunited, volunteers or vaccination, out of every 100 stories about harm. A topic, not an outcome: talks that fail still count.
- Few stories
- A country with only a few stories is drawn toward the comparison, so a handful cannot top a list. Results from fewer than 50 stories about harm are marked few stories.
- Over the years
- The amount of news monitored changes from year to year — it fell by about two-thirds from 2017 to 2026 — so we compare shares and rates, never totals, across years. A total is shown only for the days you are reading.
- Missing days
- A few days are missing where our source has no record. They are left blank, never counted as zero, and charts break there. Which days →
- Deaths and injuries
- We count stories that report people killed or injured, never the number of people. Why →
The days we hold
We hold almost every day since Friday 1 January 2016 — 3,895 of 3,950. A few are missing because our source has no full record of them, in October and November 2020, August 2021, November 2022, March 2023 and June and July 2025. Missing days are left blank, never counted as zero.
Which days
4 Oct 2020; 8 Oct 2020; 13 Oct 2020; 16 Oct 2020 – 17 Oct 2020; 20 Oct 2020 – 21 Oct 2020; 24 Oct 2020 – 26 Oct 2020; 28 Oct 2020 – 4 Nov 2020; 6 Nov 2020 – 10 Nov 2020; 14 Nov 2020; 16 Nov 2020 – 17 Nov 2020; 7 Aug 2021 – 10 Aug 2021; 15 Aug 2021 – 19 Aug 2021; 11 Nov 2022; 23 Mar 2023; 14 Jun 2025 – 1 Jul 2025.
Limits
Machine reading makes mistakes, and the news itself is uneven: English-language and US outlets are the largest share of what is published, and many places are barely covered at all. Read every number as a signal about coverage, not a fact about the world. Country comparisons and feelings measure news coverage: they are not a judgement on any nation or its people, not a measure of what people there actually feel, and not a count of the total harm.
Our source
We read the news through the open record published by The GDELT Project, which monitors the world's news media and makes a machine-read record of it free for anyone to use; we thank them for keeping it open. Everything on this site — the counts, tags, measures, maps and writing — is our own, and any mistakes are ours. You may reuse our work for any purpose, with credit: see Terms.
Contact and corrections
Seen something wrong? Write to info@theimpactdigest.com. How we handle your account details: Privacy.