About News Atlas

News Atlas is an interactive 3D globe that visualizes how news stories are covered across the world in real-time. Search any topic—from geopolitical events to technology trends—and see where coverage originates, which outlets are reporting, and how perspectives differ by region.

How It Works

When you search a topic, News Atlas queries the GDELT Project's real-time news database—one of the largest open datasets of global news, monitoring print, broadcast, and web news in over 100 languages from nearly every country. Articles from the past 30 days are retrieved, enriched with outlet metadata, and clustered by geographic location.

Each point on the globe represents a cluster of news sources. Click any point to see the articles from that location, including outlet name, bias classification, and whether the source is state-controlled media. The color coding indicates political lean: blue for left-leaning, purple for center, red for right-leaning, and yellow highlights state media.

Technology Stack

  • CesiumJS — Open-source 3D globe rendering engine used by NASA, NOAA, and major mapping applications. Provides smooth WebGL-based visualization with terrain, imagery, and custom data layers.
  • GDELT Project API — Real-time global news monitoring that processes millions of news articles daily, extracting entities, themes, and sentiment across languages.
  • React — Component-based UI framework managing search state, article selection, and interactive elements.
  • Custom Outlet Database — A curated dataset of 500+ news outlets with headquarters coordinates, bias ratings (from AllSides and Media Bias/Fact Check), outlet type classification, and state media flags.
  • Astro — Modern static site generator that hydrates the React globe component only on the client, keeping initial page load fast.

Why We Built This

Traditional news aggregators show what is being reported but not where or by whom. News Atlas was built to make global media geography visible—to help users understand that a story covered extensively in European media may be ignored in Asia, or that state-controlled outlets in one region present a fundamentally different narrative than independent press elsewhere.

This matters because media ecosystems shape public understanding. A reader in the United States sees American-centric coverage by default. News Atlas breaks that filter, showing how the same event appears through the lens of Al Jazeera, the BBC, Xinhua, RT, and hundreds of other outlets simultaneously.

Data Sources & Methodology

Article data comes from GDELT's DOC 2.0 API, which provides article URLs, titles, publication times, source domains, and detected languages. We enrich this with our outlet database to add precise coordinates (headquarters location, not server location), bias ratings, and media type classifications.

Bias ratings are sourced from AllSides (U.S. outlets) and Media Bias/Fact Check (international outlets), with manual review for outlets not covered by either. State media flags are based on ownership structure—outlets directly controlled by governments are marked regardless of their editorial quality.

Geographic clustering groups nearby outlets (within ~100km) to prevent visual clutter. When multiple outlets from the same city report on a topic, they appear as a single larger point that expands on click.

Limitations

News Atlas reflects what GDELT captures, which skews toward English-language and Western sources despite GDELT's multilingual capabilities. Some regions—particularly sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia—are underrepresented. Bias ratings are imperfect and contested; we display them as one data point, not definitive truth. Real-time data may include errors, duplicates, or misclassified articles.

Questions or feedback? Contact us at editor@proxima.earth.