A standing study · updated monthly
Who actually writes the world’s news?
We checked the provenance of 882 news sources drawn from 416 outlets in 94 countries. Most of them were not doing their own reporting.
Every figure below is drawn from sources whose provenance we could establish, and carries a margin of about four points either way.
Half the time, two newspapers from different countries were printing the same agency’s words — under two different mastheads.
This is the reason “read more than one source” is not, on its own, useful advice. Two sources can be one source wearing two hats.
Where the copy comes from
Of the 441 sources carrying someone else’s reporting, these supplied the most. Roughly three in five came from a wire agency. The rest were credited to another named organisation — usually a newspaper or broadcaster, sometimes an official source.
No country’s press is exempt
The obvious next question is whether some countries’ media do more of their own work than others. Barely, and only at the extremes — almost every pair of countries here has overlapping ranges, so putting them in order would be spurious.
Bars show the plausible range for each country, not a single figure — with a few dozen sources apiece, the honest answer is a band. Listed alphabetically, because ranking them would imply a precision the data does not have.
Countries with at least 20 verified sources. Ranges are 95% confidence intervals. That even the most independent press here sits near 40% is the point: reliance on agency copy is a feature of how international news is produced, not a national characteristic. A high share is not automatically a failing either — a small outlet running Reuters on a distant war is doing something sensible. It matters when every outlet available on a story is doing it at once.
Who was still doing their own reporting
Outlets appearing at least five times with verifiable provenance, ranked by how often the words were their own.
Three stories you can check for yourself
Everything above is a count. Here is what it looks like on a single story — three bulletins in which one organisation supplied the reporting for outlets in three or more different countries at once.
These are not hand-picked. The page takes the most recent stories meeting that bar — two supplied by a wire agency, one by another single source the rest relayed, never the same supplier twice. Every source card on those pages links to the original article, so you can check each one.
2026-08-21 · 3 outlets, one source: XinhuaCourt hands Evergrande founder life sentence as outlets split between justice and crisis fallout🇨🇱 La Tercera Chile🇨🇳 China.org.cn China🇩🇪 Manager Magazin GermanyRead that edition →
2026-09-02 · 5 outlets, one source: Peru’s Ministry of Foreign AffairsPeru severs Iran ties over Hormuz trade blocks while Latin America and energy watchers diverge on blame🇦🇿 APA Azerbaijan🇧🇷 Estadão Brazil🇨🇳 China Daily China🇵🇪 Gestion Peru🇸🇾 SANA SyriaRead that edition →
Why we counted this
The Intelligence Bulletin exists to set national coverage of the same event side by side. That only tells you something if the coverage is genuinely different. So we check, on every story, whether each outlet wrote what it published.
The answer, more than half the time, is no — and when it is no, the copy usually traces back to one of three organisations. Comparing outlets without checking this produces a false sense of corroboration: the same account, counted several times.
Method, and what this does not show
Every source in a Bulletin edition is checked for a byline or credit identifying a wire agency or another publication. A source is counted as carrying agency copy only when such a credit is found, and as original only when the outlet’s own reporting is identified. Where neither can be established the source is excluded rather than guessed at.
- Window: 2026-08-01 to 2026-09-02. 882 sources across 184 editions.
- Excluded: 114 sources (13%) whose provenance could not be established — paywalls, pages that would not load, and outlets that credit nobody. All percentages here are of the 768 we could verify.
- Not a random sample. These are the sources our editorial process selected for comparison, which favours breadth of country over breadth of outlet. It describes the press as it presents itself on contested international stories, not the whole of journalism.
- A credit is not a verdict. Running agency copy is normal practice and often the right call. The finding here is about concentration, not laziness.
This study is rebuilt automatically at the start of each month, as new editions are published — every figure above moves as the archive grows. Last updated 2026-09-02.
We do this check on every story we publish.
Several times a day, we take one story moving through the global press and set out how different countries are reporting it — checking, for every source, whose reporting it actually is.