ITK's confirmation rate rests on a single idea: that when an established outlet reports the same story a journalist broke, it means something. BBC Sport, Sky Sports News and ESPN FC have editors, standards and a reputation to lose. If they run it, it was real.
That logic holds right up until the outlet isn't doing any reporting of its own.
Every major outlet publishes a version of the same thing. The BBC has its gossip column. Sky has Paper Talk. ESPN has Transfer Talk. They appear daily, they're popular, and they are openly what they say they are: a collection of what other people have reported. Each item is attributed — according to this newspaper, reports that journalist — because aggregation is the entire format.
Now consider where that material comes from. Much of it comes from precisely the reporters ranked on this leaderboard. And follow the loop:
1. A tracked journalist posts a scoop.
2. The gossip column picks it up and credits them.
3. The outlet's account posts a link to that column.
4. ITK sees an outlet reporting the same story, and records the scoop as confirmed.
Nothing has been verified. The journalist's own claim has travelled in a circle and come back wearing a referee's shirt. Left unchecked it would inflate confirmation rates across the whole table, and it would inflate it most for whoever the columns quote most often — which is to say, for the loudest and best-known accounts rather than the most accurate ones.
Round-up posts are excluded from confirming anything. They are still collected and still form part of the archive — they simply cannot award the tick the confirmation rate is built from.
They're identified two ways, because either alone would be brittle. The first is the headline formula these columns actually use. They are strikingly consistent: "Wednesday's gossip column", "Football gossip", "transfers and rumours", "Paper Talk", "Transfer Talk", "the back pages". That pattern list is kept deliberately tight and is tested against genuine outlet reporting to make sure ordinary phrasing doesn't trip it — a post saying a club has ended speculation over a player, or that a broadcaster understands an improved offer has been made, must pass through untouched.
The second is judgement. The same AI that groups posts into stories also assesses whether a post is aggregating other people's reporting or presenting the outlet's own, which catches wordings no keyword list could anticipate. A post has to clear both checks to be allowed to confirm.
The same principle produces a second restriction. Some of the journalists ranked here are employed by the confirming outlets. When one of them breaks a story, that outlet publishing it is not an independent check either — it's the same newsroom putting the same reporting out on a second account, and it happens close to automatically.
So an outlet cannot confirm a story broken by its own employee. Those reporters need one of the other organisations to pick the story up, which is exactly the standard everyone else is already held to. Their pages say so openly, because a leaderboard that applies a hidden handicap is worse than one that applies none.
Both rules make the site's headline numbers look worse. Confirmations get stripped, confirmation rates come down, and the table appears less flattering to some well-known names than it otherwise would.
That's the point. A verification signal that can be triggered by the thing it's meant to be verifying isn't a verification signal, it's decoration. The number is only worth publishing if the check behind it is real — and every confirmation on this site names the outlet and links straight to the post, so you never have to take our word for it.
🤖 Automatically classified. Everything described here is applied by software, and software gets things wrong. The scores measure this published methodology — not a reporter's honesty, competence or professional standing. Anything on the site can be challenged, and disputed items are suppressed while they are checked. ITK is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to BBC Sport, Sky Sports News, ESPN FC or X.