[SpicyLemonZest]

For a concrete example, I just checked CNN's website, and the top article is about a pretrial ruling by the judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse case that the prosecutors should avoid using the word "victim". I don't see any plausible argument that this is the most important news story in the country this morning - if you had only 5 minutes to read the news, you'd be much better served by their articles about Facebook's ranking system or progress on Covid vaccine approval for kids. But it very well might be the most provocative!

[b3morales]

Checking now (about half an hour later), I see a half-dozen stories about the "Rust" movie shooting (a video statement by a sheriff as the top headline), with Rittenhouse just below that. Do you have a reason to believe these are being ranked by some kind of editorial interest and not simply by new-ness?

[SpicyLemonZest]

Like the Facebook timeline (and I don't think that's a coincidence!), newness is a big factor but not the only factor. They publish their "top stories" section as an RSS feed (http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss), and you can see it's both not strictly chronological and clearly has editorial topic selection, as opposed to their "most recent" feed (http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_latest.rss) which seems to be a true chronological order of everything they publish.