Eleven outlets covered the payments startup's funding round on the same Tuesday: two wire pickups, a handful of trade sites, a cluster of local business journals running the press release close to verbatim. Search those same outlets six months later and the trail stops. No follow-up, no retrospective, no mention in anyone's year-end roundup of the sector. The Wikipedia article built from that Tuesday lasted three weeks before a deletion discussion closed it as a redirect to a list of similarly funded startups.
The guideline doing the work there is WP:NOTNEWS. It measures sustained coverage rather than volume, and the editor who closed that discussion wasn't counting to eleven. What mattered was that every one of the eleven existed because of the same press release, published within the same seventy-two hours, with nothing independent following once the news cycle moved on.
Compare a second startup, smaller and less funded, whose launch drew three modest mentions. Unremarkable, on the day. Four months later a trade publication used the company as a case study in a piece about a shift across the sector. A year after that, a business outlet profiled the founder in a feature that wasn't about the funding round at all. Three sources became five, spread across fourteen months, written by people with no reason to cover the company again unless something about it still seemed worth writing about. That spread is what got the article through a deletion discussion without a second nomination.
Even extensive coverage in reliable sources is a weak basis for an article when that coverage is confined to a brief period tied to a single news story, rather than appearing over time.
Sustained doesn't mean constant. Nobody expects monthly coverage of a mid-sized company. It means that some of the coverage exists because an independent source chose, on its own schedule, to return to the subject — not because a wire service re-ran a release, and not because a dozen outlets with the same embargo deadline all filed within the same window.
That's why a folder of clippings measured in volume misleads whoever sends it. A dozen articles dated the same week describe one event, however many bylines ran it. An editor weighing notability is asking a narrower question: does anything in independent, reliable coverage exist that was written after the news had stopped being news? When the answer is no, WP:NOTNEWS applies regardless of how many outlets picked up the story on day one.
The practical version of the test is patience. A quiet launch that gets revisited later — in a retrospective, a profile, an analysis once the outcome is known — builds exactly the kind of record this guideline was written to recognize. A loud launch that never gets revisited has produced an event, not a subject.
