Read outside your bubble.

Every 15 minutes we read the public feeds of 80 BC news outlets. We group headlines that are about the same event into one story. For each story you see:

• Who covered it, as a row of squares , one per outlet.
• Who owns them, by colour. Most of what BC reads comes from a handful of companies, and that matters more here than any left/right label.
• Who didn't. A story that only independents are running, or a story one chain's outlets didn't run, is called a blind spot. We flag those.

Every headline links straight to the original article. We show a sentence or two, never the full story. If a piece is good, the outlet that wrote it gets the click.

A blind spot is a BC story that one part of BC's media covered and another part provably didn't. We watch six big chains: Black Press, Glacier, Postmedia, and the broadcasters CTV, Global and CityNews, each counted on its own. A newsroom is an owner that ran its own version of the story; wire copy and roundups don't count as a version, though a chain that ran wire copy still counts as having covered it.

There are three kinds.

• Skipped by a chain: at least three newsrooms covered the story, and a chain with at least five outlets in the story's region ran nothing on it.
• Only small outlets: at least two newsrooms covered it and none of the six chains ran anything.
• Only the chains: at least three newsrooms covered it and all of them belong to the six chains.

We only say a chain didn't run a story when we can prove it: we must have read at least 80% of that chain's outlets in the region (for “only small outlets”, every chain with three or more outlets there), each one checked successfully from the moment the story first appeared until six hours later, with no gap long enough to miss an item. That's why no story is called a blind spot in its first six hours, and why the outlets we list are only the ones we actually watched.

The region is the story's own region, or all of BC for a province-wide story. A story gets at most one label: a chain skip first, then small outlets only, then chains only.

These are never blind spots:

• Stories outside BC
• Election-results roundups covering several places
• Stories that are province-wide only because their newsrooms are split between regions

Blind spots stay listed for 72 hours after the story was last updated.

Here's something we didn't expect to find.

A lot of BC's local papers belong to the same owner, and they share copy. One reporter writes a story, and it runs, word for word, on twenty-three papers' websites from Sooke to Terrace. That's real reach, and it's often good journalism. But it's one article, not twenty-three.

When one chain runs the same article on twenty-three sites, we count it once: one newsroom, twenty-three outlets. On every story we show:

• Newsrooms: how many separate organizations actually reported it.
• Outlets: how many sites ran it.

When those two numbers are far apart, you're looking at syndication. When three different owners each wrote their own version, that's a story a lot of people independently thought mattered.

Stories that two or more newsrooms reported can get a short summary at the top of their page: what's being reported, and how the coverage differs. Anthropic's Claude writes it, and it's always labelled “AI summary”.

• Built from headlines and feed descriptions only. The same short text each outlet publishes in its RSS feed. We never fetch or feed in full articles.
• Checked twice. Every sentence is checked against those sources by two separate verification passes. A sentence that doesn't hold up both times is cut.
• Opt-outs respected. An outlet opts out of AI when its robots.txt blocks Anthropic's crawlers. Text from outlets that opt out of AI is never sent to Claude, so it's never summarized or used for titles. All headlines and short descriptions, including theirs, pass through OpenAI's embedding API to group stories. OpenAI doesn't use this data to train its models, and we've turned off data sharing in our account. We're moving that step to a model we run ourselves after the election.

The versions underneath are the record; the summary is a guide to them. If one gets something wrong, tell us at hello@thespread.ca.

• Not a bias meter. We don't score outlets left or right. Those scores are mostly imported from the US and don't map onto BC politics. Ownership is a fact; lean is an opinion.
• Not an algorithm. Everyone sees the same front page. Nothing is personalized to keep you scrolling.
• Not a publisher. We don't write the news, and we don't republish it. We're a map of who did.

The Spread News is built in Victoria by NovelLogic Ventures Inc., an independent BC software company. No media company owns any part of it.

The Spread News apps for iPhone and Android are coming soon.

Spotted a mistake, or an outlet we're missing? hello@thespread.ca

Run a newsroom and want your feed added, changed or removed? See how our crawler works. Removal takes less than a day, no questions asked.