Crosswire.online

crosswire.online puts the live front pages of news outlets side by side, so you can see how the same day is being framed in different countries — and across the political spectrum.

The name comes from the journalism practice of cross-referencing narratives across regions. It answers questions like: how is this story leading in Germany versus the UK? What is above the fold in Spain, and is it the same story in France?

How it works

Pick a country — from the picker, or from the interactive 3D globe — and Crosswire renders those outlets’ actual homepages side by side through a server-side proxy. Not scraped headlines: the real front pages, as their readers see them.

Features

• 907 outlets across 186 countries — the full directory is published as open data under CC BY 4.0
• Political spectrum presets — curated Left · Center · Right comparisons in 36 countries, with per-outlet leaning labels drawn from AllSides, Ad Fontes and Media Bias/Fact Check, and the sourcing documented publicly
• Translate in place — any proxied front page can be machine-translated into 16 languages without leaving the comparison
• Layouts — two, three or four columns, relaxed or compact
• Favourites — save outlets across countries to browser storage; no account required
• Outlet profiles — a page per outlet with its leaning, type and description
• Self-healing previews — a weekly job probes every outlet through the production proxy; ones that can no longer be rendered are automatically skipped and shown as a fallback card with a direct link

Tech stack

• Next.js 15.5 with the App Router, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS 4
• three.js with react-globe.gl for the globe, lazy-loaded as an opt-in browse mode
• Deployed on Cloudflare Pages. The runtime split is deliberate: the home route and the proxy run at the edge, everything else is statically generated, which keeps the worker inside Cloudflare’s size limit
• The proxy handles charset detection, bot-wall detection, user-agent escalation and edge caching with a stale-on-error reserve
• No database and no CMS — the outlet directory is typed data in the repo

I wrote up the engineering problems in Building Crosswire.online.

Built and operated by Nexo Apex SL.