How the report is made

Where the items come from

The items are the news digest entries collected during the month from the public feeds of the publishers we follow. The digest page lists each item with its source.

What is done to them

• Items that are off topic are dropped.
• Items are grouped into subject areas by the words in their headline and summary.
• The report counts how many items each area got and how that changed from the month before.
• The charts and tables are drawn from those counts, and every chart has its numbers in a table you can open.

Limits

• The sample is small, and it comes from a short list of publishers. A topic they ignore does not appear.
• A count of articles shows what was written about, not how many businesses were affected.
• The advice in each report is our reading of the counts. Other readers may reach different conclusions.
• A report is only built when there are at least 10 items for the month.

Checks

Each report passes the same plain-English check as our articles before it is published. Reports uploaded by hand pass it too.