Nutgraph preserves the essential narrative of a story as it changes over time.

In journalism, the nut graph is the part of a story that tells you why it matters. It gives the facts around it a center of gravity.

Nutgraph applies that idea to the life of a story. We track important claims and ongoing narratives as the evidence changes, preserving the developments that moved the story forward and the sources behind them.

Two Kinds of Topics

• Living Topics Ongoing narratives, trends, or debates that don't have a fixed end. These evolve over time as new evidence emerges — we preserve the trajectory rather than forcing a premature conclusion.
• Bounded Claims Specific assertions with an eventual outcome — a price, a date, a charge — that resolve as Confirmed, Disproven, or Partial. We track evidence until a conclusion is actually reached.

Both are tracked the same way: evidence accumulates, Evidence Strength updates, and Narrative Direction shows which way the sources currently point. Nothing is treated as resolved until it actually is.

How We Value a Topic

• Evidence Strength How closely the accumulated evidence still lines up with the premise a topic started with — Low, Moderate, High, or Collapsed. This isn't a belief we're asserting: it's computed directly from each piece of evidence's tier and direction, plotted against when that evidence actually came out. We're not telling you how much to believe something — we're reporting how the evidence has moved.
• Narrative Direction Which way the evidence is currently pointing — Rising, Falling, or Steady. Applies the same way to Living Topics and Bounded Claims alike.
• Clusters The number of independent lines of evidence behind the current Evidence Strength — not just repeated mentions of the same source.
• Tier How directly a piece of evidence bears on the claim. Tier 1 is a primary source — a filing, a direct statement, a government record. Tier 2 is reporting or secondary analysis. Tier 3 is commentary, opinion, or unverified reports — social posts, punditry, anything not yet independently confirmed — weighted lowest of the three.

How a Bounded Claim Resolves

• Confirmed The claim held up as stated.
• Disproven The claim did not hold up.
• Partial Part of the claim held. Part of it didn't.

*If new evidence on a topic surfaces, we reopen the claim and the status returns to Ongoing, the prior outcome is cleared, and the evidence trajectory picks up from where it left off.