About Crosswire
Compare headlines across countries in a minimalist, side-by-side view
What is Crosswire?
Crosswire is an ultra-minimalist web application that lets you compare digital media headlines and front pages across different countries. By placing major news outlets side by side — and, with the leaning presets, a left-leaning, a centrist and a right-leaning title together — it makes differences in framing, emphasis and story selection immediately visible. The same event can lead one front page and barely appear on another; Crosswire is built to surface exactly that. It is free, requires no account, and shows each outlet's live front page rather than a cached copy.
Features
- • Compare news outlets from 186 countries
- • Curated Left · Center · Right political-leaning presets for each country
- • Multiple layout options: columns and multi-column views
- • Compact and relaxed viewing modes
- • Interactive 3D globe for country selection
- • Automatic country detection based on your location
- • Mobile-optimized responsive design
- • Seamless translation to 16 languages
How it Works
Crosswire fetches each outlet's front page server-side and re-serves it through a proxy so it can be shown in a consistent, side-by-side view. Along the way it detects the page's character encoding so non-Latin scripts render correctly, forces a light colour scheme for visual consistency, and neutralises scripts that would otherwise redirect a narrow pane to a non-existent mobile address. When an outlet blocks embedded previews, a clean card offers a one-tap way to open it in a new tab. The app detects your country from your connection and can take you straight to local sources, or you can pick any country yourself.
How leanings are determined
The Left, Center and Right labels are approximate editorial orientations drawn from widely cited media-bias assessments — such as AllSides, Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias/Fact Check — together with each outlet's reputation and ownership. They describe a general tendency, not a precise score, and are offered to help you read the same story from different perspectives rather than as definitive judgements. Where no confident rating was available, or where an outlet is genuinely centrist or state-aligned, it is shown as Center. If you think a label is wrong, corrections are welcome.
Technology
Built with Next.js 15, React 19, and Tailwind CSS. Deployed on Cloudflare Pages with Edge Runtime for fast global performance. The 3D globe is powered by Three.js and WebGL. New outlets are validated through the rendering proxy before being published, so the comparison panes show real front pages rather than errors.
Author
Crosswire is created and maintained by David Pelayo, a software engineer passionate about media, technology, and global perspectives. Follow on X: @pelayocodes