AI & Editorial Standards

Last updated: August 9, 2026

Most articles on this site were drafted by software and edited by a person. We say so on every one of them, by name. This page explains exactly what that means, because "AI-assisted" on its own tells you almost nothing.

Our bylines are real

Every article carries one of two kinds of byline: a desk — an organization, like "The CommonWires News Desk" — or a named person. We do not invent staff writers. There is no such thing on this site as a byline belonging to a person who does not exist, and no desk byline carries a photograph of a face, because a face asserts a person.

Every published article also names an editor of record: a real, contactable human being who is answerable for it. This is enforced in software, not policy — an article with no named editor of record cannot publish. If you see an article on this site, a person put their name on it.

What the software does

• Drafts from verified source data. Our pipeline gathers public records, official data feeds, and published reporting, then drafts an article from that material. It is not asked to recall facts from memory; it is given sources and asked to write from them.
• Checks its own claims against those sources. Every factual claim is traced back to the source material it came from. A draft where too many claims can't be traced does not publish.
• Checks the risky claims against independent sources. Claims that could hurt someone if wrong — a person named in connection with wrongdoing, a death, an arrest, a business closing, an official vote, a dollar figure, a scheduled date — are re-checked against live sources that are not the original. A claim that independent sources contradict fails outright. A claim nobody can corroborate is held for a person to look at.

What a person does

A human editor reviews what the checks hold back, and is responsible for what publishes under their name. Editors can send a draft back, or publish one the automated checks flagged — but only by putting their own name on it as editor of record. There is no way to publish anonymously past a flag.

What we don't do

• We don't publish articles attributed to people who don't exist.
• We don't use synthetic photographs of people, ever.
• We don't run AI illustrations on hard news or sports. Where we do use a generated image — an editorial column, a recipe, a video background — it is credited "Illustration: AI-generated" on the page, and the image file itself carries the IPTC digital source type that marks it as synthetic, so the disclosure travels with the file even off our site.
• We don't rewrite another newsroom's exclusive and call it ours. A story resting on a single outlet's original reporting is held for review and, if it runs, runs as a brief that links to them.

The same story across our sites

We publish local brands in many towns off one newsroom. When a regional or national story matters in several of them, only one version is submitted to search engines; the copies on our other sites are marked noindex and left out of those sites' sitemaps. Where we rewrite a story substantially for a particular town, that version stands on its own. We measure this: each site tracks what share of its pages are its own work, and a site that falls below our floor doesn't get to expand until it comes back up.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell the editor of record named on the article, or write to corrections@thecommonwires.com. We correct on the article itself and say what changed. An article that turns out to be wrong at its foundation is pulled, not quietly edited.

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