The urgency score: how breaking news sorts itself
Not all news is equally urgent — but to a keyword filter, it is. "Explosion" in a movie review and "explosion" at a refinery look the same. NewsAgent Data takes a different approach: every article that enters the system receives an urgency score from 0 to 10, and that score — not a keyword list — decides what surfaces.
What the score means
Urgency answers one question: does someone need to know this now? Routine announcements, opinion columns and evergreen explainers sit at the low end. Market-moving decisions, disasters, conflict escalation, sanctions and major political developments climb to the top. The score is calibrated so that a 9 is genuinely rare — when one appears, it deserves the name "breaking".
The score adapts as the story develops
News is not static, and neither is the score. As an event unfolds — confirmed details, official reactions, casualties updated, markets responding — related reporting is grouped into the same event cluster and the picture is reassessed. A story that starts as a routine 4 can climb as its real weight becomes clear, and a scare that fizzles settles back down. You're tracking a living assessment, not a snapshot taken at the moment of publication.
Why it beats keywords
- No false positives from vocabulary. Context decides, not the presence of an alarming word.
- It works across languages. The same 0–10 scale applies whether the story breaks in English, Russian, Spanish or Portuguese.
- One threshold, everywhere. Filter the API at
min_score=7, or just open the live feed — it publishes only stories that clear the same high bar, updated about every minute.
The public feed is the score made visible: open newsagentdata.com/news/ or the Russian edition and you're looking at the top of the scale, right now.