Which specialist outlets break stories that turn out to be real?

Pre-registered 2026-09-13 · readout no earlier than Tue Jun 01 2027 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) · status: registered

The question

Do the outlets that open the most stories also open the ones that get confirmed, or are those different outlets?

Hypothesis, stated in advance

Volume and corroboration rate are uncorrelated or weakly negatively correlated — the outlets publishing most are not the ones publishing best.

What would count as support

Spearman correlation between an outlet’s story volume and its corroboration rate is not significantly positive.

Method

For each publisher opening at least 20 clusters, compute the share later corroborated. Spearman rank correlation between volume and rate. Publishers are reported individually; no composite score is published until a full year of data exists.

Data

thestaticwire.clusters
thestaticwire.items

Known confounds

Written down before the result, so they cannot be discovered conveniently late.

Outlets covering different beats face different base rates — a UAP-policy outlet is covering material mainstream press already tracks, while a cryptid outlet is not. Beat mix must be controlled or reported alongside.
Small-n publishers produce unstable rates; the n>=20 floor is set in advance to avoid post-hoc threshold picking.

Result

Not yet. Data is still accumulating and the readout date has not been reached. Whatever it says when it arrives — including nothing at all — will be published here.

Amendments

Changes made after registration. Appended, never edited over.

2026-09-13 — Inherits the recognised-publisher requirement from the corroboration-rate amendment of 2026-09-13.

Data access

/api/v1/analyses returns this register as JSON, including every entry that found nothing.