Peak News Connections: a briefing covers a day, a story takes a week

A Peak News briefing tells you what happened today. But most stories do not fit into one day.

Monday. Seven in the morning, the coffee still too hot to drink. The Peak News briefing opens with the usual: a library extends its opening hours, a council argues about a budget. Halfway down, under energy, two lines: over there, drones have hit two oil refineries. Fire, black smoke, a photo taken from a car window. A smile slips out. A sip, a scroll, on to the next topic.

Tuesday. The usual coffee, the comfy chair. Officials over there deny any strikes on refineries. Clear enough. Scroll the feed a while longer, and in a different topic you come across one quiet line: both refineries have stopped production for repairs. Repairs of what, the briefing does not say.

Wednesday. Queues at petrol stations, with a photo: a line of cars along the road shoulder, a driver dozing over the wheel, and somewhere near the horizon someone arguing that the queue starts not at the pump but three kilometres away, the other way. Officials now speak of falling debris, nothing more. In a separate item, the ministry insists petrol stocks are fine.

Thursday. Petrol is limited to 20 litres a car. That one stands out. Not because anyone still remembers the refineries, three days and a hundred and twenty posts ago, but because "20 litres a car" is a line that sticks.

Friday. Their government declares the situation fully under control. Of course it does. Further down, among the lighter news, a man finally pays off last month's mortgage by selling ten litres of "coloured water" to a driver who would rather not queue. Meh...

Five briefings. Nine items about one story, spread over five mornings and four topics, each a few lines long and easy to skim past. The story is there only if somebody remembers all of it, in the right order. Nobody does. Nobody should have to.

Friday, second coffee. The alternative. Open Connections in Peak News. The whole week is on one screen: every day a column, every event a dot. A line between two dots is a link:

• Follow-up: the newer event continues the older one.
• Cause: one led to the other.
• Context: one explains the other.
• Same event: reported twice, counted once.
• Contradiction: two accounts that cannot both be true.

Choose the event "Petrol limit: 20 litres a car". A dark line runs back through the week, day by day: the queues, the halted production, the drones on Monday morning. Everything else fades to grey: the library, the marathon, the museum, the derby. Every event keeps the posts it cites, so any link can be checked against the source.

Then the red lines. No strikes, then only debris, and two refineries standing idle. Plenty of petrol, 20 litres a car. And by Friday the situation is fully under control. No briefing points that out, because each sees only its own day. Put the days side by side and it is hard to miss.

One honest note. Not every link is a fact. Some are stated in the posts, some are inferred from them, some are only possible. The line shows which: solid, dashed, dotted. A dotted line deserves the trust of a rumour: interesting, not proven. Take the man with the "coloured water": a dotted Context line runs from him to the 20-litre limit. Probably not about water.

Peak News reads the public channels you pick and sends one briefing: grouped by topic, in your language, every point linked to its sources. Connections lay the same briefings out as a week.

A Peak News briefing and its Connections are built from what the channels in your subscription post. Nothing more, nothing less. Each subscription has its own channels, so each has its own briefing and its own week. The petrol story is only an example: your channels write about other things, and your week will show their events and their links. Change the channels, and the week changes with them.

To try it, open any briefing and follow the Connections link. The longer a subscription has been running, the more there is to connect.

Meanwhile.

Saturday. Coffee, chair, Peak News. A fire at a third refinery; officials call it a planned exercise. On the right edge of the screen, a new dot. A red line already runs from it back to Tuesday.