How LebNews works

1. Discovery

We check each publisher's public feeds (RSS, news sitemaps or section pages) on a schedule — every few minutes for fast-moving outlets. We respect robots.txt, rate limits and any publisher that asks not to be indexed.

2. What we keep

We never republish full articles.

• The headline, publisher, publication time, author where available and a short excerpt
• The link to the original article — always
• Topics, people, places and organisations mentioned
• A preview image hot-linked from the publisher with credit; we do not copy or re-host images

3. Grouping into stories

When An-Nahar, Naharnet, MTV and L'Orient Today all report the same event, our clustering engine groups them into one story using multilingual semantic similarity, shared named entities and timing. Arabic, English and French reports of the same event land in the same cluster. Editors can merge, split or lock clusters.

4. The LebNews summary

For stories covered by several publishers we generate an original summary: what happened, what we know (each point cited to its source), why it matters and what happens next — only when the sources themselves say so. Where publishers disagree, the summary says so and attributes each version. The summary never adds facts that are not in the sources and never claims independent verification.

5. Ranking

Top stories and Trending are ranked by how many independent publishers cover a story, how quickly coverage is growing, how recent it is, the importance of the people and institutions involved, and reader engagement. The weights are published in our editorial policy. Ten copies of one agency wire do not count as ten confirmations.

6. Humans

Editors review breaking candidates, correct headlines and summaries, and act on publisher requests. Corrections are logged publicly.