News Heatmap
Article density choropleth built from the same 93 sources as the News Dashboard.
What It Does
The News Heatmap is the geographic view of the same intelligence pipeline that powers the News Dashboard. Where the Dashboard shows a z-score tile grid, the Heatmap shows a choropleth map — countries coloured by raw article density in the selected window. Darker means more articles, regardless of whether that is unusual for that country.
Use the Heatmap when you want geographic context — to see which regions of the world are dominating coverage simultaneously, or to find stories in countries you might not think to check on the Dashboard. The intel panel in the top-left surfaces the fastest-rising and fastest-cooling countries so you do not have to scan the whole map.
Clicking any country opens the full country drill — the same deep intelligence panel as the News Dashboard, including the heuristic article analysis.
Data Source
Same 93 international RSS feed pipeline as the News Dashboard. The News-Chef background worker polls feeds every 7 minutes, machine-translates non-English content, classifies articles by category, and runs NLP entity extraction to build country attributions. The heatmap reads article counts per country from the same data store.
The heatmap shows raw density, not z-score anomaly. A country that always generates high coverage (like the United States) will always appear dark. To see what is unusually high, use the News Dashboard z-score view or the intel panel's Top Rising list.
Reading the Map
Choropleth fill — article density:
- Dark fill: high article volume mentioning this country
- Light fill: low article volume
- No fill / dark grey: no articles in the selected window
Intel panel (top-left, collapsible):
- Summary: total articles in window, high / mid / low trust breakdown, average trust score
- Top Rising: countries gaining coverage fastest — sorted by velocity increase
- Top Cooling: countries losing coverage fastest — may indicate a story resolving or being displaced
- Sparkline: 24-hour total article volume showing the shape of the day's news cycle
Legend (top-right, collapsible): colour scale from no data to peak density.
Controls
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| 1h / 6h / 24h | Changes the article count window for both the map and the intel panel. |
| Intel panel header | Click to collapse or expand. Collapsing gives more map space on smaller screens. |
| Legend header | Click to collapse or expand the colour scale. |
| Refresh button | Manually triggers a fresh data fetch outside the automatic cycle. |
Country Drill
Click any country on the map to open the country drill. The map slides aside and the full intelligence panel opens — identical to the News Dashboard country drill:
- Velocity Signal: current articles/hr vs baseline rate, percentage deviation from normal, and z-score
- Corroboration: green CORROBORATED badge when 3+ independent high-trust sources (≥0.7) publish in the same window, triggering the 1.2× velocity bonus
- Trust Signal: high / mid / low article counts and average trust score across the window
- Top Sources: ranked list of outlets contributing the most articles for this country
- Category Mix: proportional colour bar showing topic breakdown
The article feed on the right is filterable by category tab (ALL / MILITARY / GEOPOLITICAL / HEALTH / ARTS / GENERAL) with article counts per tab. The drill panel has its own independent time window — you can examine a different period in the drill without changing the map view.
Open
Click any country on the choropleth. The drill panel opens over the map.
Filter by category
Use the tabs at the top of the article feed to narrow to a specific topic.
Change the drill window
The 1h / 6h / 24h selector inside the drill is independent from the map.
Open an article
Click any article card to enter the heuristic analysis panel.
Exit
Click ← Back, press Escape, or click outside the overlay.
Heuristic Analysis — The Glass Box
Click any article card in the drill to open the heuristic analysis panel — the same panel available from the News Dashboard. This is NeoLexx's transparency layer: it shows you exactly how the algorithm read the article and why it attributed it to each country.
Color-coded entity extraction is applied to the headline and RSS summary. Every significant term is highlighted by signal type — blue for country entities, amber for category signals, purple for named entities. You can read the article and see the algorithm's reasoning simultaneously.
The Country Weighting card shows every attributed country with:
- Attribution score (0.0 – 1.0)
- Signal strength: STRONG (title match or multi-field) vs WEAK (summary-only)
- Which fields matched: title, summary, or both
- The exact terms that triggered the match
The metadata row at the top of each article shows: category classification, whether the article was machine-translated, whether a source-home fallback was used, and a direct link to the original publisher. Nothing about the article's processing is hidden.
Limits
- Shows raw article count, not anomaly — a consistently high-coverage country always appears dark on the map
- Coverage reflects what is in RSS headlines, not on-the-ground event density
- NLP attribution can misattribute articles that mention a country incidentally — the heuristic panel lets you verify this yourself
- The intel panel's Top Rising list is a better anomaly indicator than the choropleth fill colour