Project Push creates an archive of news alerts from around the world

A little over a year ago, Matt Taylor began to feel like he was getting a few too many push notifications from the BBC News app.

It’s a feeling many of us can probably relate to. Many people, myself included, have turned off news notifications entirely in the past few months. Taylor, however, went in the opposite direction.

Instead of turning off notifications, he decided to see how the BBC — the most popular news app in the U.K., where Taylor lives —  compared to other news organizations around the world. So he dug out an old Google Pixel phone, downloaded 61 news apps onto it, and signed up for push notifications on all of them.

People who work in news “take the front page very seriously,” said Taylor, a product manager at the Financial Times who built Project Push in his spare time. “There are lots of editors who care a lot about that, but actually one of the most important people in the newsroom is the person who decides that they’re going to press a button that sends an immediate notification to millions of people’s phones.”

The Project Push feed is a fascinating portrait of the news today. There are the expected alerts — breaking news, updates to ongoing stories like the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the latest shenanigans in Washington — but also:

— Updates on infrastructure plans that, without the context, become absolutely baffling (a train will instead be a bus?).¹

First renationalised train will be a rail replacement bus
via The Telegraph

— Project Push (@project-push.tk.gg) May 23, 2025 at 10:40 AM

— Naked attempts to increase engagement.

Tap here to catch up with all the latest news

via NDTV

— Project Push (@project-push.tk.gg) May 27, 2025 at 7:46 AM

— Culture updates that some may argue aren’t deserving of a push alert from the Associated Press.

‘It’s like old times’
Phineas and Ferb return this summer with zany new episodes and a small change.
via Associated Press

— Project Push (@project-push.tk.gg) May 28, 2025 at 3:10 PM

— Whatever this is.

Video by
Hercules apologizes and kisses Sutiyoso
via CNN Indonesia
(machine translated)

— Project Push (@project-push.tk.gg) May 28, 2025 at 10:30 AM

Taylor tells me he’s noticed some geographic differences in how news outlets approach push notifications. Publishers based in Asia and the Middle East, for example, send far more notifications than European or American ones; CNN Indonesia alone pushed about 17,000 of the 160,000 or so notifications Project Push has logged over the past year.

Sky News Arabia, meanwhile, live-blogged Trump’s inauguration speech via push notification in January, buzzing their users every minute or so. And push notifications from the New York Times’ Chinese edition are far more detailed than those from the English edition because each Chinese character contains so much information:

Varying lexical densities across languages is so cool.

@project-push.tk.gg is having difficulty posting notifications from NYT Chinese because the mandarin push notifications translate consistently above 300 latin characters.

The following push was 95 characters, it expands in English to 342.

— Matt TK Taylor (@tk.gg) November 28, 2024 at 8:28 PM

As with any early-stage project, there are a few limitations. The first is the way push notifications work: according to Taylor, app developers can only send push notifications to a set number of users — often somewhere in the thousands — every second.

For an app with only a few users, each user receives the push notification at the same time. But an app with a large user base, like the BBC’s, has to get around that limitation by creating a queue. That means some users may get push notifications a minute or two before others, depending on their place in the queue, so the timestamps in the Project Push database don’t necessarily reflect when each publisher sent out their push.

Similarly, because Project Push runs entirely off one phone, it can miss notifications if the phone goes offline for an update.

There are geographic limitations, too. Some American publishers’ news apps aren’t accessible from the U.K., so Taylor can’t add them to Project Push. Push notifications in languages other than English — CNN Indonesia, Haaretz and Sky News Arabia use Indonesian, Hebrew, and Arabic respectively — have their text automatically translated by an AI before they’re added to the Project Push page.

This can lead to odd mistakes; a Sky News Arabia notification about an Israeli airstrike, for example, mistranslated the word “airstrike” as “bullshit.”

The biggest gap, Taylor tells me, is that Project Push doesn’t include Apple News. “That is a huge publisher, especially in the U.K.,” Taylor said. “Their editors have crazy editorial control.” Apple’s developer tools currently don’t allow for notifications to be logged the same way Taylor’s Android phone does, and Apple News is only available on iPhones, so Taylor’s hands are tied until one of those factors changes.

Taylor isn’t sure what the future of Project Push looks like. He’s playing around with the idea of creating tools for publishers to analyze how their push notifications perform, which could potentially even include some sort of data-sharing mechanism for publishers to learn best practices from each other.

For now, though, the project has served mostly as a useful way for Taylor to understand trends in the news industry writ large. Recently, he said, he’s noticed an uptick in publishers including links to “watch live” or “follow live,” which makes him think many publishers are seeing returns from emphasizing content like live blogs. He’s also noticed some publishers emphasizing the names of individual reporters in their push alerts — an indication they’re trying to create household names through push notifications.

And as for the question that started it all, about how the BBC compares to its peers?

“My view of the BBC is actually way more positive,” Taylor told me. “They don’t send out nearly as many notifications as the others, and theirs are generally much more newsworthy.”

1. “You’re so lucky you don’t know what that means,” Taylor told me. Good luck to the U.K. and its public-transport plans, I suppose.