What's new in Crosswire

Since 21 August you can install Crosswire. It is on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Apple silicon Macs, and on Google Play for Android phones, tablets and Chromebooks with the Play Store — free on both, version 1.0.0, no account. It is the same idea in a shape a phone can hold: two live front pages side by side, the pages their editors actually published, in their own layout and their own order of importance.

Everything the directory holds went with it. The same 907 outlets, the same 186 countries, the same curated Left · Center · Right comparisons in 36 of them, the same translation into 16 languages. Nothing was held back for the app and nothing was held back from it, and no outlet, country or comparison is reserved for readers who have paid — on either platform.

One thing is genuinely different, and it is the reason this note is longer than a launch announcement needs to be. The apps meter their free tier: seven comparisons per calendar month, then a wall. The website has no such limit and is not getting one. If the allowance is in your way, crosswire.online is free, unmetered, and one tap away — that is not a consolation prize, it is the same product without the cap. What Crosswire Pro buys, on the phone, is Crosswire's own tooling: more panes at once, saved comparison sets, your own presets, and the removal of the small banner that runs on the country picker and the outlet directory. It has never bought, and will not buy, access to somebody else's journalism.

That distinction is load-bearing enough to be built into the app rather than promised in a paragraph. Advertising may appear only on screens Crosswire wrote itself — the picker, the directory, search — and never on, beside or over a publisher's front page. The list of ad-eligible screens is a constant in the source, an unclassified screen refuses by default, and the test suite fails if any comparison screen ever accepts one. Undoing it takes editing a constant and deleting a test that explains, in English, why it is there.

On the website, the apps now have a page of their own at /apps: both listings with their published facts, the six screens from the store, what each tier costs, and a table setting the app against the website row by row — including the row where the website wins. The homepage carries the two store badges below the country picker, and the FAQ, the machine-readable index at /llms.txt and the site's structured data all now answer "is there an app, and is the news behind a paywall?" without anyone having to guess.

The home page used to be rebuilt from scratch on every single visit, purely so it could greet you with your own country. That one convenience was costing everybody else the wait: measured from Madrid, the page took about 440 milliseconds to start arriving, against roughly 140 for every other page on the site. Your country is now looked up separately, a moment after the page appears, so the page itself can be served ready-made. It now starts arriving in about 105 milliseconds — the shortcut still shows up, just a heartbeat later.

There is a new way in. Until now you could browse 186 countries or nothing in between; there is now a layer above that, grouping the whole directory into six world regions with the numbers that actually distinguish them — how many outlets each has, how they spread across the spectrum, and how much of the press is publicly funded. Two of those numbers surprised us: Oceania has the most deeply publicly-funded press of any region, and across the Middle East and North Africa there is not a single public-service broadcaster in the directory at all.

Every kind of outlet now has a page of its own. There were five — public broadcasters, news agencies, business dailies, tabloids and portals — and four kinds were missing, which meant 664 outlets, including every ordinary daily newspaper, could only be reached through their country. Newspapers, digital-native outlets, television news and magazines now each have a directory, with an explanation of what makes that kind of outlet read differently from the rest.

Crosswire has also published its first piece of actual writing, and it is a criticism of its own data. Across all 907 outlets, 84% carry the Center label — which, read plainly, would mean the world's press is overwhelmingly centrist. It isn't. The Center bucket does two jobs at once: genuinely centrist outlets, and every outlet for which no confident left-or-right assessment was available. The proof is a pattern nobody had looked for: in countries where we track only two or three outlets, 100% are labelled Center; where we track eight or more, that falls to 64%. Press diversity does not work that way — what changes is how much has been written about that country's press, not the press itself. The piece is published in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian.

Finally, Crosswire now says who it is when it visits a publisher. Every request carries a name and a link to a new page explaining what the fetcher does and how to block it, the weekly directory check reads and obeys each site's robots.txt before going anywhere near it, repeat visits ask 'has this changed?' instead of downloading the page again, and a site that asks us to slow down is left alone rather than retried. Two publishers turned out to disallow everything; they are now skipped entirely, and still perfectly visible to you.

Opening a country used to fetch every comparison pane at the same moment — and each pane is a real, live front page, which brings along that outlet's own video, adverts and tracking scripts. On a phone, a busy country page could pull tens of megabytes before it settled. Now only the first pane loads immediately and the rest wait until you scroll to them. Nothing has been removed and no pane is degraded; they simply arrive when you need them.

Outlet profiles have been rewritten to be more useful and less repetitive. Each one now names the actual titles on the other side of its own country's spectrum, so you can see at a glance who to read it against, and explains what tends to differ between that kind of outlet and its rivals — a public broadcaster and a tabloid make different choices, and the page now says which. The long classification disclaimer that used to sit on all 907 profiles has been condensed to a sentence, with the full explanation a click away in the methodology.

Country pages describe their own press more honestly. Instead of one paragraph repeated everywhere, each now reflects what the data actually shows: whether that country's titles span the full spectrum, cluster near the centre, or have no outlet on one side at all — which is worth knowing before you assume a comparison is balanced.

Every outlet profile now shows when the directory was last reviewed and carries a Suggest a correction link. Crosswire's leaning labels are approximate by design and occasionally wrong; the last time a reader pointed that out, four US labels changed. Making that easier to do seemed overdue.

Since launch, Crosswire guessed where you were connecting from and took you straight to that country's front pages. The guess was usually right — and wrong just often enough (travel, VPNs, corporate networks) to be annoying. From today the landing page leads with choice instead: every visit opens on the country picker, in text mode by default, with the searchable list of all 186 countries one keystroke away. Your detected country isn't gone — it appears as a one-tap shortcut right under the search box.

There is a speed dividend too: the 3D globe now loads only when you switch to Interactive mode, so the landing page ships far less JavaScript on a first visit. Old crosswire.online/?select=true links keep working — they simply show what is now the default.

Crosswire now covers 907 news outlets across 186 countries — 62 countries join today, from Haiti, Guyana and the Caribbean islands to Papua New Guinea, Fiji and the Pacific, most of West, Central and East Africa, the Central Asian republics, Kosovo and the European microstates, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Palestine. Every added outlet was verified through the rendering pipeline before going live, and existing coverage deepened too: Canada, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Japan, South Korea, Türkiye, Israel, Greece and two dozen more countries gained major voices chosen to widen their editorial spectrum. Curated Left · Center · Right comparisons are now available in 36 countries, up from 29.

The rendering proxy got tougher. It now escalates through three fetch strategies — a desktop browser, a search crawler, and a link-preview fetcher of the kind nearly every publisher allows so their stories unfurl on social media — which rescues outlets that used to show an error card (Politico among them). It also speaks each country's language when fetching (a Spanish paper is requested the way a Spanish reader would), keeps last-good copies of front pages for about two hours to ride out outages, and its guard against sites that mistake a narrow pane for a phone is now sturdier across browsers. Two outlets that had quietly moved domains — Algeria's El Watan and Vietnam's Tuổi Trẻ — were fixed and preview again.

Previews now look after themselves. Every week, Crosswire automatically tests all 907 outlets through the production proxy — from the real infrastructure users hit — and records which ones genuinely cannot be embedded. Those outlets stay in the directory and keep their profile pages and one-tap "Open ↗" links, but the comparison view no longer wastes a pane on them: default panes, Prev/Next rotation and the political-spectrum presets all skip them automatically, and the full audit report is published in the repository with every run.

Finally, a correction, prompted by a sharp-eyed reader: The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and NPR were labelled Center, while the media-bias assessments our methodology cites (AllSides, Ad Fontes Media, Media Bias/Fact Check) place all four left of center. All four now carry the Left label, and their descriptions say why. Crosswire's labels are approximate by design — but they should at least agree with the sources they come from. Spotted something else that looks wrong? Email [email protected].

Crosswire has always tried to be a transparent lens on the world's front pages. This release makes the lens itself transparent. A new Methodology page explains, in plain language, how the 638 outlets are selected, how the Left · Center · Right labels are assigned and where their limits are, how the live previews actually work, and how to reach us when something is wrong. A companion FAQ answers the questions readers ask most — from "why can't this outlet be previewed?" to "what happens to my data?" (short answer: it stays in your browser).

The whole outlet directory is now open data. A machine-readable JSON file lists every outlet with its country, editorial leaning, outlet type, description and homepage — free to reuse with attribution under CC BY 4.0. Researchers, journalists, students and AI assistants can take the same dataset that powers Crosswire and build on it. It sits alongside the refreshed llms.txt and llms-full.txt indexes that help AI assistants read and cite the site accurately.

Under the hood, every page is now fully readable without JavaScript. Previously, the About, What's new, Privacy and Terms pages rendered their text in the browser, so search engines, AI crawlers and readers on slow connections could briefly see placeholders instead of content; that text is now part of every page from the first byte. These release notes gained real structure too — dated entries with permanent links and an Atom feed you can subscribe to — and the site's structured data now describes Crosswire, its dataset and its pages in the vocabulary search engines and answer engines understand.

Crosswire now compares the front pages of more than 600 news outlets across 124 countries. This release adds 24 new countries — Malta, Albania, North Macedonia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Moldova, Belarus, Armenia, Nicaragua, Bahrain, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Rwanda, Zambia, Angola, Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia, Cambodia, Mongolia, Brunei, Afghanistan and Laos — and deepens left, center and right coverage in dozens of existing ones. Every new outlet was checked through the rendering proxy before going live, so panes show real front pages rather than errors.

We fixed a class of rendering bugs where some sites (such as Germany's BILD) detected the narrow comparison pane as a phone and tried to redirect to a mobile address that doesn't exist, leaving a blank or broken frame. The proxy now neutralises these width-based redirects, so those outlets render correctly while still adapting their layout to each pane.

Under the hood there is a new proxy self-check used in development to confirm, outlet by outlet, whether a site can actually be collected and rendered correctly — making it much easier to keep coverage healthy as the web changes.

We also fixed the country search so its suggestions are no longer hidden behind the globe, and expanded the About page with more detail on how Crosswire works and how editorial leanings are determined.

Crosswire now spans 100 countries and nearly 380 outlets — with 18 new markets including Slovenia, Cyprus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar, Oman, Cuba, El Salvador, Trinidad & Tobago, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe and more.

The rendering proxy is far more reliable: smarter character-encoding detection fixes garbled text on Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Greek and Cyrillic outlets, and pages now resolve correctly even when an outlet redirects. When a site genuinely can't be embedded, a clean preview card now offers a one-tap way to open it in a new tab — no more blank panes.

A refreshed interface brings the proper Geist typeface, softer depth and shadows, a sticky translucent header, and smooth entrance animations throughout. Outlet panes show an elegant shimmer placeholder while each front page loads.

Crosswire is now far easier to explore and to find. Every country has curated political-leaning comparisons — Left vs Center vs Right, and a focused Left vs Right — and each of the 379 outlets has its own page with an English description, a live preview, its editorial leaning, and links to related sources at home and abroad. New directories tie it together at /compare and /outlets, backed by a complete sitemap, robots rules, and machine-readable llms.txt and humans.txt files so search engines and AI assistants can understand the whole project.

Seamless language translation: select any of 16 languages to automatically translate both the app interface and proxied news outlet pages. The full frontend experience is now internationalized.

The interactive 3D globe has been redesigned with country polygon areas instead of dots, making it much easier to select countries. Hover highlighting and smooth animations provide a polished experience. The globe now auto-detects your location and centers on your country.

New multi-column layouts (2, 3, or 4 columns) let you compare more outlets side by side.

Crosswire launched with the core vision: compare how major media outlets across countries present their front pages, side by side. The initial release included: