Terms of Service — Front Pages

1. What this is

Front Pages collects the headlines that each country's most-read news outlets are currently leading with and shows them on one page. It is free, has no accounts and nothing to sign up for. Using it means accepting these terms.

We are not a news organisation. We do not write, commission, edit or verify any of the journalism shown here. Every headline and excerpt comes from a feed the publisher offers for syndication, and every headline links to the publisher's own article.

2. What it is not

The site is provided as is, with no warranty. Specifically:

Stories can be out of date. Fetches run roughly every two hours, and when a publisher's feed is unreachable we keep showing their previous stories rather than emptying the card. Each card shows when that outlet was last fetched — that timestamp is the real answer to "how current is this?".
The outlet list is not exhaustive. Several major outlets publish no usable feed and are therefore absent. A country's page is not a complete picture of its press.
We may be wrong. Feeds break, publishers restructure their sites, and our matching can misfire. If you spot something wrong, please tell us.

Nothing here is a substitute for reading the outlets themselves, and nothing here is advice of any kind. We do not guarantee the site will be available or error-free, and we may change or discontinue it at any time.

3. How the order is decided

This is worth being straight about, because it is the part people notice. The order you see is our reconstruction, not a ranking the outlet published. No newspaper publishes a machine-readable list of what it considers today's most important story, so there is nothing to simply copy.

What we do instead is read each outlet's own homepage and measure how prominently it is running each story — chiefly how near the top of the page it appears, how many times the page links to it, and whether it gets a headline-and-picture treatment or a one-line mention. Those measurements are combined into a ranking, and the outlet's stories are shown in that order. Where we can also tell that other major outlets in the same country are leading with the same story, that counts too.

Two consequences follow, and both are honest limits rather than bugs:

It will not always match what you see on the outlet's site. A homepage is a visual layout with several columns, panels and rotating slots; we are reading its underlying structure, up to two hours old, and reducing it to a single list of six. Close is the goal; identical is not achievable.
For a few outlets we cannot read the homepage at all. Some block automated requests outright. For those, the stories shown are the ones the rest of that country's press is also leading with, most recent first — a reasonable guess, and clearly a weaker one.

Opinion columns, blogs and editorials are shown after news rather than mixed into it. Sponsored posts, horoscopes, shopping links and live tickers are filtered out entirely.

4. Whose content this is

Headlines and excerpts belong to the publishers who produced them. We claim no ownership and grant you no rights over any of it. It appears here as short excerpts from feeds published for syndication, always attributed and always linked to the original.

Outlet names and logos are used only to identify the source of a headline, and imply no endorsement of, or affiliation with, this site.

The software behind the site is separate and is released under the MIT licence. That covers the code only, never the news content it displays.

5. Publishers

If you publish an outlet shown here and would rather not be included, contact us and we will remove you. You do not need to give a reason and we will not argue the point.

We fetch each outlet's public feed and homepage roughly every two hours, one request each, with an identifiable user agent. We do not fetch article pages, extract article text, or attempt to bypass paywalls, registration walls or access controls of any kind.

6. Using the site

Please do not place automated load on it beyond ordinary reading, try to disrupt it, try to reach the non-public parts of it, present its output as your own or as a publisher's own, or use it in a way that breaks the law or infringes a publisher's rights.

The underlying data files are openly readable and you are welcome to build on them, subject to the publishers' rights in the content itself. Please be considerate about request volume.

7. Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for any loss or damage arising from your use of this site, from reliance on anything shown here, or from anything on the sites we link to — including decisions taken on the basis of a headline that turned out to be stale, mis-ordered or absent. Linked sites are not under our control and we are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices.

Where local law does not allow those exclusions, they apply only as far as it does allow, and your statutory rights are unaffected.

8. Changes and contact

We may update these terms; the date at the top shows when they last changed, and continuing to use the site after a change means accepting the revised version. Questions, corrections and publisher requests all go through the contact page.