The Daily Box Score

Read this first — what a cell is, and what it is not

1. A cell is minutes of airtime a channel spent inside one story cluster — a SQL sum over story boundaries drawn by the desk’s machine segmenter. Row labels are the segmenter’s own labels, not quotations from anyone.
2. Every minute is a minute of captured tape, not of a network’s full air. A dash (—) means not observed in the windows the desk captured — never “zero minutes aired.” The desk cannot see what it did not record.
3. Channels are uneven by tape length (hours stated above). More minutes can mean more tape, not more emphasis; no cross-channel ranking should be read into a single day.
4. This day’s numbers are frozen: the page renders from a write-once snapshot taken when the broadcast day closed, and later re-processing can never quietly change it.

Full method: the Method. The record behind the denominator: the capture record.