A 7.4-magnitude earthquake tore through Colombia's coffee-growing region early Monday — the country's most powerful in decades, flattening buildings in Pereira and Cali, cracking a cathedral tower in Manizales. This piece is not about the earthquake. It's about what France 24's feed looks like while covering it, because as of this afternoon, four versions of the death toll are live on the same site at the same time. * Monday's article, still up and still circulating in the feed: 'Colombia declares national emergency as quake toll hits 111.' Tuesday morning's article: 'Colombia rescuers race against the clock as quake death toll tops 220.' The body of that second article, updated within the hour: 'at least 224 people have been killed.' And the quietest witness of all — the article's own web address, which reads 'death-toll-reaches-164,' a fossil from whatever hour the piece was first filed. One story. One outlet. 111, 164, 220, 224 — depending on which link the algorithm hands you. * None of this involves anyone lying. Tolls rise; updating them is journalism doing its basic job, and F24's newest number is as current as anyone's. The problem is a format. When the number is the headline, the headline starts dying the moment it's published. A wire-churn operation like F24's doesn't go back to yesterday's pages — it just files a new page with a new number on top of the old ones, and the old ones keep circulating, still confidently wrong. The reader who lands on 'toll hits 111' today has no way to know they're reading a gravestone for Monday afternoon's information. * Compare the desks that made a different choice. NBC's headline: 'Search Underway After Deadly 7.4 Earthquake Strikes Colombia.' No number — and therefore still true this morning, and still true tonight. The subject is the thing that's actually ongoing: the search. The toll belongs in the body, where it can be updated next to a timestamp, not in the headline, where it fossilizes. * There's something else the running count does, and it's worth saying plainly: each of those headline revisions — 111 to 164, 164 to 220 — is several dozen human beings, compressed into an odometer tick. The format reports the number as the event. What happened between those headlines is that rescuers pulled more bodies out of collapsed apartment blocks; what the feed records is that a figure incremented. * We keep an eye on France 24's Latin America desk for a reason. Three days ago, its Colombia headline blamed a bombing on nobody at all — 'Blast wounds two' — while adjective-bombing the country's new president in every other sentence. The desk has frames to spare when the story is politics. When the story is bodies under rubble, the frame collapses into a number with a verb on it: hits, tops, climbs, rises. And we've seen the mirror image of this too — an outlet burying a toll at paragraph 17 when the number complicated the day's framing, as BBC did with Ceuta's hundredth death. The toll leads when it's all you have; it hides when it argues with you. * The honest version of disaster coverage is one continuously updated report with its revision history worn openly — 'as of 4pm: 224 confirmed dead' — not an archaeology site of abandoned numbers. Until then, the death toll from Colombia's earthquake, according to France 24, is 111, 164, 220 and 224. All at once. Pick a page.