The X-Score, Explained.
Every X-News headline is printed with an X-Score — a 1-to-10 credibility rating our editors compute before publication. This is how that rating is built, what each point means, and how it is revised after a story runs.
Six dimensions. One score per story.
Every X-Score is the sum of six editorial dimensions, each rated independently by two editors and reconciled before publication. A story cannot earn a point it has not been measured against.
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01
Source Independence
Whether the named sources speak on the record, on background, or anonymously — and whether at least one is structurally independent of the story's subject.
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02
Corroboration
Each headline must link back to three or more independent outlets. Single-source reporting cannot score above a 5.
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03
Primary Documentation
Court filings, financial disclosures, satellite imagery, raw datasets, vote tallies — the underlying artifacts a reader can open and inspect.
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04
Recency & Verification Window
Time elapsed between event and publication, and whether the editors waited for confirmation from a second channel before filing.
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05
Contestation
Known disagreements, rebuttals, or competing claims are surfaced and linked — not buried. The story tells the reader what is still in dispute.
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06
Provenance
The chain of custody for every document, photograph, and dataset — including the bureau that obtained it and the editor who signed off.
X-Score measures the credibility of a single piece of reporting. It is not a measure of a topic, an outlet, or a journalist — and we will never aggregate it into leaderboards.
Four recent headlines, scored and noted.
Each row below was published in the last 30 days. The number on the left is the X-Score printed on the story. The note on the right is the editor's one-line rationale.
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9.4 Politics
Primary document, three independent corroborations, two named dissenters on the record.
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8.1 Markets
SEC filing + company release + two analyst notes; efficacy figure contested by one independent reviewer.
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7.0 Science
Peer-reviewed preprint, four co-author interviews, but atmospheric retrieval still contested across teams.
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6.2 World
Two on-the-ground correspondents plus satellite imagery, but one party has not confirmed the terms.
From 4.2 million fact-checks to a number on a headline.
X-Score is computed in two stages. First, a supervised model — trained on 4.2 million fact-checks logged by the X-News Fact-Check Network since 2017 — produces a candidate score from the structured signals in the draft: source count, primary documents attached, recency, and prior X-Score history of the bylined desk. Second, two editors from the Standards Desk score the same draft independently against the six-dimension rubric. The published X-Score is the reconciled mean of the two editorial scores, with the model output retained as an audit trail.
The thresholds are intentionally conservative. A 7 means we believe the core claim is true on the available evidence and that any dispute has been surfaced. An 8 requires primary documentation that a reader can open. A 9 requires at least one named source speaking on the record in addition to the documentation. A 10 is reserved for stories that survive a 24-hour cooling window with no material correction — and there have been 412 X-10s published since 2017.
No score is final. If a story is revised, contradicted by a primary source that emerges later, or formally corrected by the X-News Fact-Check Network, the X-Score is revised in place and a dated correction note is appended to the article. The original score is never erased; readers and citation tools can see the trajectory.
"We designed X-Score to be cited. Every number on a headline is reproducible from the rubric, the training corpus is documented, and every revision is dated. If a researcher disagrees with a score, they should be able to say so — and tell us where in the rubric we went wrong."
— Dr. Helena Marković, Chair of the X-News Standards Committee
The full methodology paper, including the calibration tables and inter-editor reliability statistics from Q1 2025, is available to credentialed researchers and educators on request to the Standards Desk.
Recent corrections, scored in retrospect.
X-Score is revised after publication whenever new evidence warrants. The ledger below lists the four most recent revisions issued by the X-News Fact-Check Network.
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6.4 → 4.1 Revised 11 March 2025
Energy firm overstated Q4 carbon offsets in press release
The original headline quoted a company-issued offset figure without disclosing the third-party verifier's partial rebuttal. The score was revised after the verifier published its full methodology note.
Markets Desk · New York -
8.3 → 7.6 Revised 07 March 2025
AI lab attribution corrected in regulatory filing story
A lab name was transposed in the original filing summary. The correction is non-material to the regulatory finding, but the attribution error reduced the source-independence dimension.
Technology Desk · Berlin -
5.0 → 7.2 Revised 28 February 2025
Election turnout figure upgraded after precinct-level certification
The original story relied on a preliminary canvass. Once certified precinct totals were published, corroboration improved and contestation dropped, raising the score.
Politics Desk · Brussels -
9.0 → 9.4 Revised 19 February 2025
Climate study recalibration prompts minor upward revision
The authors published a corrigendum tightening one confidence interval. The substantive finding was unchanged and additional primary documentation became available.
Science Desk · Sydney
Who cites X-Score.
X-Score is used by analysts, press officers, and educators as a shorthand for evidence weight. The figures below describe the scale of the instrument and the standing of its publisher.
- 4.2M fact-checks in the training corpus since 2017
- 11,800+ viral misinformation claims flagged or corrected by the X-News Fact-Check Network
- 38 / 100 of the Fortune 100 license X-News for daily executive briefings
- #1 in the Nieman Lab 2024 News Quality Index for daily publishers
For analysts & researchers
The methodology paper, calibration tables, and inter-editor reliability statistics are available on request for academic and journalistic citation. Email the Standards Desk →
For press & PR teams
If your organization has published a correction that affects an X-News headline, send the primary documentation to [email protected]. Revisions are reviewed within one business day.
For educators
The X-Score rubric is freely available for classroom use under a CC BY 4.0 license. Download the rubric PDF reference from the archive →