About rbtfl

The same event, seen from everywhere.

What this is

rbtfl is a minimalist world-news reader. For each event it collects how newsrooms in different countries and on different sides covered the same facts, and puts those accounts side by side.

The name is short for "read between the f****** lines". The premise: no single outlet shows you the whole picture, and the gap between accounts is itself information.

How a story is built

Every story starts from a census of coverage: sources from every continent, and within contested stories, the national voices on each side of the dispute. State-linked outlets are always paired with independent, market or opposition press from the same country. Sources are read in their original language.

Primary records come first: treaties, official statements, court filings, agency releases. Original reporting is quoted in short, attributed excerpts, always linked to the source. rbtfl never republishes article text, and each story carries at least three independent sources.

How the site is organized

Stories live in a topic graph. Trackers follow ongoing beats such as conflicts, central banks or chips. Dossiers hold the background: who the actors are, how the systems work, what happened before.

The front page is a rolling rank of importance and freshness. There are no editions and nothing is deleted; stories that stop developing sink.

The newsroom

An automated newsroom runs around the clock: it collects newly filed events every two hours, revisits recent stories every eight, reorganizes and re-ranks the graph every six, and keeps translations current in Arabic, Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

Contact