Standards

Last updated: September 22, 2026

Everything on this site is written by AI. This page explains exactly what that means, what gets checked, and what happens when something is wrong.

Cedar Rapids Common is one of the CommonWires sites, and these standards apply to every one of them.

No staff writer on this site is invented. There is no byline here belonging to a person who does not exist, and no desk byline carries a photograph of a face, because a face asserts a person. A byline names a desk: a process, not an individual.

A point of view

Every publication has a point of view, and this one shows in what is chosen and how it is written. Which stories lead, which get a second look, what a headline stresses and what a summary leaves out are editorial choices, made the way any publication makes them. What a point of view never changes is a fact: a name, a number, a date, a quote, who did what. Those are checked as described below regardless of how a piece is framed.

What the software does

• Writes from sources, not from memory. The system gathers public records, official data feeds, and published reporting, then writes from that material. It is not asked to recall facts; it is given sources and asked to write from them.
• Does not do original reporting. No one attends a meeting, interviews a source or witnesses an event for this site. Everything on it is written from other newsrooms' published reporting, public records and official data, and every item names where its facts came from.
• Links what it draws on. A page built on other outlets' reporting names them and links to them. Data pages say in their footer where the numbers came from.

What gets checked, by kind of page

Not every page gets the same check, and this list says which gets what. Where a page says how it was checked, that line comes from the record of what actually ran; a page whose record shows no separate check says nothing about one.

• Wire items and briefs are written from the source article and checked for facts against it.
• Analysis columns are written from the facts on record and checked against them.
• Planned stories get a two-layer fact check. Every factual claim is traced back to the source material it came from, and a draft where too many claims cannot be traced does not publish. 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.
• Recipes, lifestyle, travel and culture pages are drafted from cited references and checked for internal consistency: that the steps match the ingredients, the dates match the calendar, the prices and hours are the ones the reference gave.

Other newsrooms' reporting

The news page and the emails point to other newsrooms' stories the day they publish them. Each item is one sentence in the site's own words, never copied from the source, credited to the outlet and linked to its story, so the reader who wants the reporting goes to the newsroom that did it.

Analysis is different, because it is a take on someone else's work. A column built on another outlet's story is not written until a few hours after the story first appears or until a second outlet has reported it, so no one's scoop is traded on in its first hours. A story about a crime, an election result, a death or a controversy waits for that second source however long it takes.

Where the sports numbers come from

Scores, schedules, standings and statistics on the sports pages come from ESPN's public site API and the MLB Stats API; college football ratings and lines from CollegeFootballData; forecasts from the National Weather Service. Those are the facts, and this page is where the site says so. Everything written on top of them is the site's own: play descriptions are composed by its software from each play's recorded fields, never copied from a feed's text; the win-probability figures and charts come from the site's own model, labeled as such, and are rougher than a broadcaster's; previews, recaps, rankings and analysis are written from those records. The site shows no player photograph it does not have the rights to, and the sports desk does not read other publishers' articles to write its analysis — a headline, a one-line summary and the site's own records are what its writer is given.

What the site does not do

• It does not publish articles attributed to people who don't exist.
• It does not invent quotes. A quotation on this site is one a source carried.
• It does not name private individuals in crime or court coverage. Public officials acting in their office are named; a neighbor is not.
• It does not use synthetic photographs of people, ever.
• It does not run AI illustrations on hard news or sports. If a generated image is ever used — 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 the site.
• It does not rewrite another newsroom's exclusive and call it its own. A story resting on a single outlet's original reporting is not written up as a story; if it runs, it runs as a brief that credits and links to that outlet.
• It does not carry other newsrooms' opinion pieces, editorials, letters or columns as news, whichever way they lean.

The same story across the network's sites

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

Corrections

If something here is wrong, use the correction form — it opens a ticket with a 24-hour clock on it — or write to corrections@commonwires.com. It is fixed on the page, and the page says what changed. An article that turns out to be wrong at its foundation is pulled, not quietly edited.

Related: About · Privacy Policy · Terms of Service