Frequently asked questions

Crosswire is a free tool that shows the live front pages of major news outlets side by side, so you can compare how the same day is covered across countries and across the political spectrum.

The Left, Center and Right labels are approximate orientations drawn from widely cited media-bias assessments — AllSides, Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias/Fact Check — together with each outlet's reputation and ownership. Where no confident rating exists, or an outlet is genuinely centrist or state-aligned, it is shown as Center.

Crosswire covers 186 countries and more than 900 news outlets, from newspapers of record and public broadcasters to business dailies and digital-native outlets.

Yes. Crosswire is free and requires no account. Your favourite outlets are saved locally in your own browser.

Yes. The Favorites view lets you pick outlets from any country and compare their front pages side by side, in your preferred layout.

Yes. A translation selector localises both the Crosswire interface and the proxied outlet front pages into 16 languages.

Some news sites block automated access or embedding outright — common for hard-paywalled or heavily bot-protected sites. When an outlet can't be rendered, Crosswire shows a clean card with a one-tap "Open ↗" link to read it on the outlet's own site. If a site fails only momentarily, Crosswire serves the last good copy of its front page from the past couple of hours instead of an error.

Each pane is the outlet's real, current homepage fetched at view time — not a screenshot archive. Successful renders are cached at the edge for about three minutes to keep switching between outlets fast, so what you see is at most a few minutes old.

No. Crosswire does not host, rewrite, rank or reorder news content. Its proxy applies only technical normalisation — resolving relative links, fixing character encoding, forcing a light colour scheme and neutralising scripts that break embedding — so the journalism itself is untouched. Copyright remains with each publisher, and every pane links back to the original site.

Center covers two cases: outlets that genuinely sit near the editorial centre of their country's media spectrum, and outlets for which no confident, widely cited rating was available (including some state-aligned broadcasters). Leanings are within-country approximations, not a global scale — a centrist outlet in one country might read differently in another.

No. Crosswire is independent, has no commercial or editorial relationship with the outlets it displays, and receives nothing for including or positioning any outlet. Outlets are selected using the public criteria described in the methodology.

As little as possible. There is no account and no server-side profile: favourites, layout and language preferences are stored only in your own browser. Anonymous analytics run only if you accept the cookie banner — rejecting it disables them.

Yes — with attribution. The complete outlet directory (name, country, editorial leaning, outlet type, description and homepage) is published as open data at crosswire.online/data/outlets.json under a CC BY 4.0 licence, and AI-assistant-friendly indexes live at /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt. Cite "Crosswire (crosswire.online)" and link to the most specific relevant page.

Email [email protected] or message @pelayocodes on X. Corrections to editorial-leaning labels are welcome — a link to a published media-bias assessment helps. Suggested outlets are validated through the rendering pipeline before they go live, so panes show real front pages rather than errors.

Curated political-spectrum presets are available in 36 countries where the directory spans left, centrist and right-leaning outlets — including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. The full list is at crosswire.online/compare.

Crosswire is built and maintained by David Pelayo, a software engineer, and published by Nexo Apex. It launched in October 2025; the full release history is public at crosswire.online/whats-new and the methodology at crosswire.online/methodology.