What Reporting Context is

Reporting Context is a section that can appear on an article page to place a single report inside the wider body of published coverage. It answers three questions: what am I reading, how widely is this being covered, and where does it fit.

Every value in the section is either a fact attributed to a source publication or a calculation over story records. The section contains no generated commentary, and it is computed on the server when the page is rendered.

What it measures

The section reports provenance — the publication that reported the story, its publication time, and the link to the original report. It reports coverage state — how many reports the platform has for the related event, how many distinct publisher domains those reports come from, and how recently that coverage was updated. It reports placement — the tracked topic the story was matched to.

When it appears, and when it does not

Reporting Context is fail-closed. Six conditions must all pass, and if any one fails the section is not rendered at all — the article page displays normally without it. There is no partial or approximate version.

• Provenance is complete: the story has a source link, a source publication name, and a valid publication timestamp.
• The story matched exactly one tracked topic, with a label and a resolvable topic page.
• The underlying data read succeeded.
• That read completed inside its time limit.
• The topic clears the coverage baseline: at least 3 dated stories, at least 2 distinct tracked source labels, and activity within the last 7 days.
• A same-event cluster exists and is fresh: at least 2 reports, from at least 2 distinct publisher domains, updated within the last 24 hours.

Why a section is missing

The absence of Reporting Context on an article is common and carries no negative meaning. It usually means the story is early, is the only report the platform has on the event, or comes from a single publisher domain. It is not a signal about the report's accuracy or the publisher's reliability.

Limits of the section

Counts describe published reporting the platform has collected — nothing more. Wide coverage does not establish that a claim is true, and coverage from many domains does not establish that the reporting is independent of a single upstream source. HappeningNow does not verify the claims inside the reports it counts.

Coverage figures are computed over a bounded recent window, so they are floors rather than totals. Where a report and its cluster disagree, the linked original report from the publisher is the authoritative text.

Version and change history

The section carries a methodology version, currently version 1. When a threshold, gate, or displayed value changes, the version increments and the change is recorded in the revision history at the top of this page, so a reader can tell which rules were in force when they saw a page.