About the War Room
The War Room is a read-only window into the automated signal engine behind the Andrew Asks Howpodcast newsroom. All day, the engine watches public news for stories the show might talk about, scores each one, and tracks what the newsroom does with it. This site simply shows that work as it happens — ranked, timestamped, and sourced. Nothing here is editable; it is a mirror, not a control panel.
The priority number (0–100)
Every story carries an overall priority from 0 to 100, frozen at the moment it was scored. It is a weighted blend of five public factors:
| Weight | Factor | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| 0.30 | Relevance | how squarely it lands in the show's editorial lanes |
| 0.25 | Talkability | how much there is to actually say about it on air |
| 0.15 | Momentum | how fast the story is still developing |
| 0.15 | Reliability | how well-sourced and corroborated it is |
| 0.15 | Novelty | how much it isn't already old news |
The number sorts every story into one of five bands. The band word appears next to each score across the site. The bar at 70is the engine’s real cutoff: at or above it a story is alert-worthy and eligible for the daily briefing; below it, signals sit muted.
| Priority | Band | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| ≥ 85 | Urgent | top of the stack — breaking, act now |
| 70 – 85 | Alert | cleared the bar; pushed to the newsroom / daily briefing |
| 55 – 70 | Watch | on the radar, not yet alert-worthy |
| 40 – 55 | Store | logged for context; rarely surfaced |
| < 40 | Ignore | below the floor |
The verification ladder (0–5)
Separately from priority, each story sits on a six-rung ladder describing how well its facts are stood up. A story can be important and still early on the ladder — the two scales are independent. When a story is disputed, still developing, false, or retracted, it also carries a status flag — the one red mark on the site.
- 0Unsupported
- 1Origin Located
- 2Partially Supported
- 3Independently Corroborated
- 4Primary-Source Confirmed
- 5Fully Contextualized
Newsroom markers
Feed rows show what the newsroom actually did with a story:
- ● pushed— the engine sent this to the newsroom as an alert (with how long ago).
- in briefing— it was featured in a daily briefing.
- ★ picked— a human editor took it off the conveyor for the show (selected, in research, ready, or used on air).
The Rising radar
Rising is a separate, zero-cost traction radar. Rather than scoring individual stories, it watches how fast a topicis spreading across public feeds and flags the ones accelerating — a leading indicator, often ahead of the main feed. Each alert carries a rising score built from velocity(how fast it’s moving), acceleration (whether it’s speeding up or cooling off), and breadth (how many independent domains are talking). Topics that have already peaked are tagged as such.
How discovery works
The engine finds stories entirely from free, public sources — no paid wires. It polls a roster of RSS feeds (news sites, trade press, podcasts, Substacks, YouTube), runs a set of Google News queries tuned per editorial lane, and watches community signals such as Hacker News. The live Sources page shows which feeds are actually producing ingest right now.
What isn’t shown
This is a window onto the signal, not the show’s playbook. The host’s editorial prep — the angles, the “why this matters to us,” the open questions — is written for the newsroom and is deliberately kept off this page. What you see here is the neutral, factual layer: what happened, how strongly it’s sourced, and how the engine ranked it.