Questions people ask

TLC News collects the day's reporting from newspapers around the world and keeps it permanently, arranged along a real time axis, so that you can follow how a story unfolded rather than only what is new today. It is made by Time-Line Continuum, and the collection has been running since 2014.

Most news sites are built to answer one question: what is new. A newspaper drops a story off its front page within hours, and the news feeds it publishes hold only the last few items before older ones fall off for good. Every hour, we read those feeds and keep what is new, so a subject you look up here comes back with its own history: the first report, what followed, and how the account changed.

The newspapers do. Nothing here is rewritten, summarised or scored. A headline is the paper's own headline, and every story links back to the paper that published it. TLC News is an index and a time axis, not a newsroom.

Each paper is named on the news page. You can read every paper together in one stream, newest first, or choose one paper at a time when you want a single voice.

The collection has been running since 2014. How far back a particular paper goes depends on when it joined the collection. Nothing that has been collected is thrown away, and the "Jump to a day" box takes you back as far as the collection goes.

The archive is a large collection of other people’s reporting, held for readers rather than published to the world, so it sits behind a sign in. You can open an account yourself, and everything is free while the site is in beta.

Create an account if you would like one.

Nothing at present. Everything is free while the site is in beta, and no card is asked for anywhere. If that changes, we will tell you by email before it applies to your account, and you can decide then.

What an account includes

Free gives you the news itself: every paper together or one at a time, the list and the timeline, search with whole phrases, filtering by paper and category, and jumping to any day.

Reader is meant to add saved searches and alerts. Those are still being built, nobody is charged for them, and nobody will be charged without being told first. Compare the two levels.

On the create an account page, enter your email address and a password of at least 8 characters, and tick the box to accept the terms and the privacy page. A quick check confirms you are not a robot, and usually finishes on its own.

We then email you a link. Open it to confirm your address, and you can start reading straight away.

Look in your spam or junk folder first, because that is where it most often lands. If it is not there after a few minutes, write to us at info@time-linecontinuum.com and we will sort it out.

On the sign in page, under “Forgotten your password?”, enter your email address and press “Email me a sign-in link”. The link signs you in without a password. It works once, and only for a short time, so use it as soon as it arrives.

Write to us at info@time-linecontinuum.com from the address the account uses, and we will delete what we hold about you and close the account. We will not ask you why.

Type a few words in the search box. The search finds stories that contain every word you typed, wherever they appear in the story. Put words in quotation marks to keep them together as a phrase, in that order. Global warming finds stories with both words anywhere in them; "Global warming" finds only the stories where the two words sit side by side.

Each word you add makes the list shorter, and quotation marks make it shorter again. Global warming problem finds far fewer stories than Global warming, and "Global warming problem" might find none at all, because those exact words, in that order, seldom appear in a headline or summary. If you get too many results, add a word. If you get too few, take a word away or remove the quotation marks.

Once the results appear, “Sort by” changes their order. Best match puts the stories that fit your words most closely at the top, from any year: a story fits best when your words are in its headline and close together. Newest puts the most recent story at the top. Both show the same stories.

The search reads three parts of every story: the headline, the short summary under it, and the topic labels the newspaper gives it. A story can be found through any of the three. The New York Times, for example, labels many climate stories “Global Warming”, so a search for global warming finds them even when neither word is in the headline. When a label is the reason, it is the first topic link under the story.

The search also treats close forms of a word as the same word, so warming also finds warm and warmly. Adding a second word keeps the results on your subject.

The full article is on the newspaper's own website, and the search does not read it. Click the headline to open it.

The timeline draws one newspaper across a stretch of time, and it opens on the most recent 7 days so that the day you are reading is easy to find. Drawing months at once would put thousands of stories on one screen, which is not something anyone can read.

The archive itself is not limited to that window. The timeline’s “Previous week” and “Following week” buttons move it through the whole archive, and its “Jump to a day” box takes you straight to any day. The List view has its own “Jump to a day” box as well.

A few of the oldest entries were stored years ago with the web address cut short, and a handful never had one. Those stories are still here and still searchable, because what the paper reported and when is worth keeping even when the link to it is not.

Where that has happened the story says so before you click, rather than sending you to a page that is not there.

We collect from the news feeds the papers publish, once an hour. A story the paper never put in its feed is not here, and a feed holds only a short window, so a story can occasionally pass through it between one visit and the next. A story is also left out if the time the paper published it cannot be read, rather than being given a wrong date that would put it in the wrong place on the time axis.

Yes. There is nothing to install, and the text is set larger than on most websites. On a phone the news opens in the List view, which suits a small screen. The timeline is there too, with Zoom in and Zoom out buttons, but a week of stories drawn across a time axis is easiest to take in on a computer or a larger screen.

No. When you search the archive, the words you type are used to run the search and are then gone. We do not keep a history of what anyone has searched for. Read the privacy page.

There is no advertising on this site. When you sign in, your browser is given cookies that keep you signed in between pages, and they are used for nothing else.

We do count how many people visit and which pages they read, using a service that sets no cookies, does not follow you across other websites and is not linked to your account. We see totals, not individuals. Read the privacy page.

Use the contact page to send us a message, or write to info@time-linecontinuum.com.