The number of minutes appended in headlines serves as a signpost for readers regarding the reading time. Being the first on Minute News, this present quantitative study reports the results from comparative analyses of text contents of one-to-five Minute News published by one Philippine and one American media outlet in November 2018. Selected corpus comprised the combined 86 one-minute news; 421 two-minute news; 259 three-minute news; 101 four-minute news; and 77 five-minute news articles, resulting in 944 news articles. Inferential statistics reveals that there are both similarities and differences between the two groups' micro-level properties of Minute News: total word count, total unique words, number of sentences, average sentence length, number of paragraphs, hard words, lexical density; and the seven text readability index models such as Flesch, Gunning, Flesch-Kincaid, Coleman, SMOG, Automated and Linsear. Overall, if we argue that the American writers from the Inner Circle are the model of linguistic and text contents of Minute News, then the Philippine media writers who belong to the Outer Circle do not fully benchmark the standards of the American writers' microlevel linguistic properties when producing Minute News. Universal implications for literacy in second or foreign language classes, including recommendations are offered.