Stepchange News is an automated front page for climate and energy news. Every three hours it reads 39 curated sources, groups every article covering the same event into a single story, ranks those stories, and publishes the top 20. Nobody edits it.
| Refreshed | Every 3 hours |
| Sources read | 39 outlets, plus a 100-person watchlist |
| Time window | Rolling 72 hours |
| Stories published | Top 20 |
| Human editors | None |
Where the news comes from
39 hand-picked feeds: climate desks, sector trade press, primary data publishers, and the independent newsletters and podcasts that actually move the conversation. Each one carries an authority score from 2 to 5, assigned by hand, that feeds directly into ranking. The full list is in the footer of every page.
Alongside them, a watchlist of 100 influential people in climate and energy — investors, policymakers, analysts, founders, journalists — on X and Bluesky. When one of them shares an article we don't already have, we fetch it, check it is genuinely on-topic and recent, and let it compete like anything else. That is how reporting from outside the curated list gets in. But a shared link is a tip, not a byline: it can help a story surface and can never carry one onto the page by itself.
Hacker News and 7 subreddits are read for discussion only. They add context to stories that already qualified; they can't promote anything.
How coverage gets grouped
Every headline and summary is converted into a semantic vector, so two articles about the same event land close together even when they share almost no words. Articles close enough to each other become one story, with the outlet that published first anchoring it. That is why a story here shows one headline and a row of outlets, instead of eight near-identical entries.
What makes the front page
score = how many credible outlets × how fresh × how much it matters
- Corroboration. The strongest signal that something matters is independent outlets choosing to cover it. Authority is counted once per outlet, so five outlets beat one and a top-tier desk counts more than a newsletter — but one outlet filing five follow-ups adds nothing, and the tenth outlet adds far less than the second.
- Freshness. Stories fade with age, but a story still attracting new coverage fades at half speed. Go quiet and a story drops off the page within about a day.
- Judgment. Claude reads the coverage as a wire editor would and rates it 1–5 on how much it matters to someone working in energy — and, separately, whether it is really energy news at all. That second call is what keeps the page from filling with loud stories that merely feature sector logos: a Tesla self-driving lawsuit is a story about driving, not energy. Political process — hearings, proposals, statements — is capped no matter how loud the cycle; only concrete, binding action rates highly.
Three things get pushed down: company announcements no independent outlet picked up, multi-story roundups and live blogs, and nature or wildlife content with no energy angle.
Four rules that shape the page
- No more than 3 stories from any one source, so a busy feed can't own the page.
- No more than 7 policy stories out of 20, so a heavy political cycle can't sweep it.
- A story covered by only one outlet needs either a high-authority byline or a judgment that it's a real scoop — uncorroborated news doesn't get a free pass.
- 20 stories, always. A fixed page forces the ranking to make a decision.
Every story gets a permanent page
Each story has a URL that never changes, listing every outlet covering it. Where we can find them, the page also carries the underlying document the coverage is about — the filing, report or dataset — other reporting found by a live web search of outlets we don't ingest, related stories from the archive, and the discussion on X, Bluesky, Hacker News and Reddit.
What this deliberately doesn't do
- No human editor. Nobody picks stories, writes headlines or sets the order. The page is fast and tireless, but the ranking is an algorithm's opinion, not a newsroom's.
- No republishing. One neutral headline and one summary sentence per story. Every link goes to the original reporting, and every outlet covering a story is listed — not just the first or biggest.
- No engagement loop. Nothing in the ranking reads clicks, dwell time or shares. Reader behavior never feeds back into what gets shown.
- No paid placement. There is no mechanism to promote a story, and no advertising in the ranking.
It gets things wrong. An algorithm has no judgment about the story it hasn't seen, and a threshold that groups coverage well on Tuesday will split it on Wednesday. So the escape hatches are always one click away: the river shows every article in the window in plain time order, and every story page lists every outlet covering it.
This is a beta and the ranking is still being tuned. If it gets something wrong — a story misplaced, two stories that should have been one, a source worth adding — email feedback@stepchange.news.
Disclosure
Stepchange invests in climate companies. The ranking has no knowledge of the portfolio — it reads source count, outlet authority, recency and the editorial assessment, and nothing else. No portfolio company receives any boost, and there is no mechanism by which one could.