How reporting enters the platform

HappeningNow reads publicly available feeds published by news organizations and other publishers. A feed entry becomes a story record when it carries the minimum fields the platform requires: a resolvable link to the original report, the name of the source publication, a title, and a publication timestamp.

Entries missing any of those fields are not published. This is a deliberate trade: the platform would rather omit a report than display one it cannot attribute or date.

Source selection and handling

Sources are selected for subject coverage and for publishing a stable, machine-readable feed. HappeningNow describes these as tracked sources — publications the platform reads. That phrasing is precise on purpose: being tracked is a statement about ingestion, not an endorsement, and not a quality rating.

Each story displays the name of the source publication that reported it. Where several tracked sources publish on the same event, the platform counts distinct publisher domains rather than treating every republished copy as separate coverage. Syndicated and republished versions of one report are therefore not counted as independent reports.

A source can be removed from the tracked set — for example when its feed becomes unreliable, when its content no longer matches the described subject area, or at the publisher's request. Removal stops future ingestion; it is not a judgement published about that publication.

How related reports are grouped

Reports covering the same event are grouped into clusters by rule-based comparison of story text, entities, timing, and source domain. Clustering is not performed by a language model. A pair of reports is grouped only when its similarity score passes a fixed threshold, so grouping is reproducible: the same inputs produce the same grouping.

Because the threshold is fixed rather than tuned per story, some genuinely related reports are not grouped. An ungrouped report is a limitation of the comparison, not a statement that the reports are unrelated.

Categories and topics

Stories are assigned to categories, and topics are matched against a curated list of names the platform tracks. Both are rule-based: they follow published keyword, entity, and taxonomy rules rather than a model's interpretation.

Topic pages and Intelligence pages are currently excluded from search-engine indexing. They are working surfaces built from automated aggregation, and HappeningNow does not present them as canonical destinations while that remains true.

Freshness and time

The platform distinguishes the time a publisher reported something from the time HappeningNow observed it and the time a page was last recomputed. Where a page shows a timestamp, that timestamp describes the specific event it is attached to.

Coverage windows are bounded. Aggregate counts are computed over a capped recent window of stories, so a count should be read as a floor within that window rather than a total for all time.

What the methodology does not establish

None of the steps above assess whether a report is accurate. Grouping, counting, and categorizing describe the shape of published coverage. They do not establish that the coverage is correct, and a larger number of reports does not establish factual consensus.