4 Jan 2026, 15:36 UTC157 views10 reactionsread 8 August 2026
Western Montana News is archived and no longer publishing. Thanks to readers and contributors.
😢5😨5
Channel
Western Montana News
@westernMTnews
On this record: Growth · Engagement · Reactions · Posts · Citations · Cite this entry
135subscribers
-1 since we began measuring on 8 August 2026
Risers and fallers across the register · movement among entries of Under 1,000.
Register entry
| Telegram ID | -1001239438897 |
|---|---|
| Type | Channel |
| Username | @westernMTnews |
| Created | 11 January 2021 — measured — cross-checked against a third-party dataset (TGDataset) |
| First recorded | 8 August 2026 |
| Last confirmed live | 16 August 2026 |
| Measurements held | 3 |
| Confirmed unchanged | 1 time, most recently 16 August 2026 |
| On Telegram | t.me/westernMTnews |
Growth
| Measured (UTC) | Subscribers | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 16 Aug 2026, 08:56 | 135 | -1 |
| 8 Aug 2026, 23:32 | 136 | no change |
| 8 Aug 2026, 00:14 | 136 | first reading |
Engagement
20 posts held, back to 3 December 2025 — the reader has not yet reached the start of this channel’s public history, so older posts may sit further back, unread. Read across 1 pageof Telegram’s post history, 20 posts per page.
Nothing published in the last 30 days. ERR and ER are rolling 30-day measures, so there is nothing to compute — we hold 20 posts for this entry, the most recent from 4 January 2026. An engagement rate over an empty window would be a number about nothing.
Reaction mix
37 reactions across 12 posts, in 8 distinct kinds. The most used accounts for 35.1% of them.
| Reaction | Count | Share | Share, drawn |
|---|---|---|---|
| 👍 | 13 | 35.1% | |
| 💯 | 6 | 16.2% | |
| 😢 | 5 | 13.5% | |
| 😨 | 5 | 13.5% | |
| 🤡 | 3 | 8.11% | |
| 🤣 | 2 | 5.41% | |
| 🤯 | 2 | 5.41% | |
| 🔥 | 1 | 2.70% |
No sentiment is inferred, and none should be read in. This table is ordered by count and by nothing else. Emoji do not carry stable meaning across languages or communities — 🙏 is thanks in one channel and mourning in another — so we publish which ones were pressed and how often, and pass no judgement on what an audience meant by them.
Precision. Telegram publishes reaction counts per emoji and short-forms each one — 4.34K, 1.2M — so any single kind at or above 1,000 reaches us at three significant figures, and only counts below 1,000 are exact. The shares above are ratios of those figures and carry the same error. This is also why the total here can differ slightly from a reaction total printed elsewhere on the page: both are sums of the same rounded parts, taken over samples with different edges.
Coverage. Reactions were read on 12 of the 20 sampled posts in this sample. Summed by Telegram’s own count on each post — not by adding up the per-emoji breakdown above — those same posts carry 37reactions in total: the kind of figure the paragraph above means by “a reaction total printed elsewhere on the page”.
Measured over the 20 most recent posts we hold, published 3 December 2025 to 4 January 2026, using the newest reading held for each. Telegram Stars are excluded: they are a payment, not a reaction, and they have their own section.
Recent posts
23 Dec 2025, 02:54 UTC177 views2 reactionsread 8 August 2026
Montana's 1972 constitution creates a fundamental problem: unelected university regents have been granted power that contradicts the document itself. The Montana Supreme Court keeps making it worse, granting power over the legislature. https://www.westernmt.news/2025/12/22/the-montana-constitutions-state-university-quagmire/
👍2
22 Dec 2025, 19:18 UTC146 views3 reactionsread 8 August 2026
OPINION: If you have to pay the government every year to keep your home, do you really own it—or are you just renting from the state? https://www.westernmt.news/2025/12/20/property-taxes-turn-montana-owners-into-renters/
💯3
22 Dec 2025, 19:17 UTC127 views3 reactionsread 8 August 2026
OPINION: HB 680 puts Montana's historic treasures at risk. A 99-year lease of Virginia City and Nevada City gives private operators control with minimal public oversight. These towns belong to Montanans—not corporations. The Legislature should repeal this bill, writes HD69 candidate Trevor Walter. https://www.westernmt.news/2025/12/20/hb-680-a-bad-deal-for-montanas-historic-treasures/
👍3
22 Dec 2025, 18:43 UTC121 viewsread 8 August 2026
Teachers Unions: 1 Montana Parents: 0 Teachers unions block parent choice. Montana judge halts ESA program in blow to families seeking education alternatives. https://www.westernmt.news/2025/12/22/montana-families-face-uncertainty-after-judge-blocks-esa-program/
12 Dec 2025, 04:02 UTC121 views2 reactionsread 8 August 2026
A Shelby woman with prior immigration convictions received just three months in prison for harboring undocumented immigrants across three Montana counties. The case involved multiple traffic stops and revealed a pattern of transporting people from Canada. https://www.westernmt.news/2025/12/11/repeat-offender-gets-just-3-months-for-harboring-illegal-aliens-across-three-montana-counties/
🤯2
12 Dec 2025, 03:19 UTC95 viewsread 8 August 2026
Montana declares disaster as atmospheric river brings record rainfall to northwestern counties. 6.5 inches fell in 24 hours, washing out bridges and closing major highways. Multiple communities affected as rivers reach flood stage. https://www.westernmt.news/2025/12/11/record-rainfall-floods-libby-troy-as-governor-declares-disaster/
12 Dec 2025, 02:50 UTC86 viewsread 8 August 2026
Two Mexican men sentenced to 39 days after November traffic stop near Malta, where Highway 191 from Canada intersects Highway 2—a key corridor for north-south traffic from the international border. Part of Operation Take Back America nationwide initiative. https://www.westernmt.news/2025/12/11/two-mexican-men-sentenced-after-traffic-stop-near-malta-on-highway-2/
11 Dec 2025, 15:27 UTC148 views2 reactionsread 8 August 2026
$800,000 to build a bridge. $800,000 to remove it. Less than 10 years between. Travis Mateer warned about the "bridge to nowhere" in 2019. Now Missoula officials want to create what one citizen called a pipeline of hole digging and filling projects. https://www.westernmt.news/2025/12/11/missoulas-800000-pedestrian-bridge-slated-for-removal-less-than-a-decade-after-construction/
🤣2
11 Dec 2025, 00:59 UTC67 viewsread 8 August 2026
Kalispell is seeking Ward 3 residents to fill a City Council seat becoming vacant when Ryan Hunter begins his term as mayor in January 2026. Interested? Submit your letter of interest by January 4, 2026. https://www.westernmt.news/2025/12/10/kalispell-seeks-ward-3-residents-for-city-council-appointment/
11 Dec 2025, 00:32 UTC133 viewsread 8 August 2026
A Mexican national with eight prior deportations has been sentenced for illegally reentering the U.S. for a second time. https://www.westernmt.news/2025/12/10/mexican-man-with-eight-prior-deportations-sentenced-for-second-felony-illegal-reentry-in-montana/
10 Dec 2025, 23:55 UTC73 viewsread 8 August 2026
A Billings man has been convicted of sexually assaulting a child on the Crow Indian Reservation in 2019. Matthew Paul Stopsatprettyplaces, 49, faces up to life in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for April 2026. https://www.westernmt.news/2025/12/10/stopsatprettyplaces-guilty-of-sexually-abusing-child-on-crow-reservation/
Showing the 12 most recent of 20 posts we hold for @westernMTnews. View and reaction counts are the latest single reading for each post, not a live figure, and a recent post is still accumulating both. A view count marked ≈ was rounded by Telegram before we ever saw it — t.me prints views in full below 1,000 and to three significant figures above, so ≈1,200,000 means somewhere between 1,150,000 and 1,249,999. Unmarked counts are exact. Text is reproduced from the public post preview and truncated for length.
Citation-graph rank
Citation-graph rank — 477,500 of 1,549,376entries in the measured graph. A weighted position computed from the forward and mention edges below — republished posts weigh more than named mentions — and recomputed periodically, over the whole graph. Published only as this ordinal position, never as a score: a position is a fact, and a score printed beside one channel’s name would read as a verdict this register does not make. The two counts beneath stay separate for the same reason mentions are never summed with forwards anywhere else on this page — a named-by count costs nothing to manufacture. The top 100 by this measure, or how it is computed.
Forward network
Republished by
Channels on the register that have forwarded this channel's posts into their own feed.
Built only from forwarded posts we have actually read, on both sides. Coverage is early and deliberately incomplete: a missing link means we have not read the post that would prove it, never that the relationship does not exist. Counts are distinct forwarded posts observed, so they only ever go up as we read more.
Cite this entry
A live page changes as we take new readings, so a citation should name the measurement it is based on, not just the URL. The line below cites the subscriber count as measured 16 August 2026 — this entry's latest reading, not the date you are reading this.
“Western Montana News” (@westernMTnews), 135 subscribers as measured 16 August 2026. Telegram Register, tgregister.com/channel/westernMTnews.
Full measurement history, CC BY 4.0. Every reading this register holds for this entry, not just the latest one, as a dated, downloadable record: CSV · JSON. Free to use with attribution to tgregister.com. Each file carries its own generation timestamp, which is the figure to cite for exactly when the data was retrieved.