About
World News Garden is an interactive globe of the world's local news. Spin it, click any city, and read what is being published there right now.
The idea
Most news reaches us through a handful of international outlets. That tells you what the world thinks is important — not what a particular place thinks is important. This is an attempt at the second thing: a way to stand anywhere on earth and read the news from there.
Coverage
- 170,541Cities
- 229Newsrooms
- 104Countries
How it works
- The globe is rendered in WebGL from NASA satellite imagery. Every populated place on earth with a thousand or more inhabitants is drawn as a dot.
- Cities with their own newsroom load that publisher's own feed. Every feed is checked before it goes in, so there are no dead entries on the map.
- Everywhere else shows coverage about that place, with each story credited to the publisher who wrote it.
- Small places roll up. A suburb has no newsroom of its own, so it shows the news of the city it belongs to — worked out from population and distance rather than a hand-written list.
Nothing is republished
You see a headline, sometimes a short summary the publisher put in their own feed, and a link. The link opens the article on the publisher's site. The reporting is theirs, the traffic goes to them, and the credit stays with them.
Where the data comes from
- Satellite imagery — NASA Blue Marble (public domain)
- Place names and coordinates — GeoNames (CC BY 4.0)
- Weather — Open-Meteo
- Headlines — publishers' own feeds, and news search for cities without one
Who built it
Durgesh Sharma, in Gurugram, India. It began as an attempt to build for newspapers what Radio Garden did for radio, and grew from there.
Questions, corrections and requests: hello@worldnews.garden.