Independence
Editorial decisions are made by the editorial desk alone. No advertiser, sponsor, subscriber, funder or partner sees content before publication, requests changes to it, or influences whether a fact check is upheld. If a funder relationship touches the subject of a piece, the piece discloses it in the text — not in a footnote.
If we ever cannot write about something independently, we will not write about it.
Non-partisanship
We do not endorse candidates, parties or ballot measures, and we do not accept political advertising. Our writing presents the strongest version of each position and identifies which parts of a disagreement are empirical (checkable) and which are about values (not checkable, and not something we adjudicate).
“Balance” does not mean giving equal weight to a well-documented finding and an unsupported claim. Where the evidence is lopsided, we say so and show why.
Sourcing
- Primary documents first: ordinances, staff reports, adopted budgets, minutes, datasets, court records.
- Every factual claim in an article is traceable to a source listed at the foot of that article.
- We link directly to the document, not to a page about the document, whenever the jurisdiction makes that possible.
- We date everything. Local facts decay fast: meeting nights change, budgets are amended, ordinances are repealed.
- We do not use anonymous sources in our own reporting. If we cannot show it, we do not assert it.
- We do not fabricate, paraphrase into quotation marks, or reconstruct dialogue.
Use of AI tools
We use software — including AI tools — for drafting support, summarizing long public documents, formatting and code. Nothing publishes without a human editor verifying every factual claim against the cited source, and responsibility for what appears here is entirely ours. We do not publish AI-generated images of people, events or places, and we do not present synthetic material as documentary.
Conflicts of interest
Editorial staff and contributors disclose: paid work for a government body, candidate, party or advocacy organization; board seats; property interests that a debated decision would affect; and family relationships with officials in a covered jurisdiction. Where a conflict exists, the person does not write or moderate that item, and the disclosure appears on the piece.
Starter debates
Debates seeded by our editorial team are labeled as such. They are written to present the strongest case on each side, not our own view, and arguments in them are held to the same evidence rules as everyone else’s. Community members can add arguments and outvote the framing — and the outcome section records what the body actually did, whatever we wrote.
Corrections
We correct promptly, visibly and without defensiveness.
| Kind | What we do |
|---|---|
| Typo, broken link, formatting | Fixed silently |
| Factual error that does not change the meaning | Fixed, with a dated correction note at the foot of the article |
| Factual error that changes the meaning | Fixed, with a dated correction note at the top of the article describing what was wrong |
| Article that is wrong at its foundation | Retracted: the text stays online, marked Retracted, with an explanation at the top |
| Outdated but not wrong | Updated, with an “Updated” date and a note on what changed |
We do not quietly delete stories, and we do not de-index a page to make an error disappear. The record of what we published, and what we got wrong, stays available.
To request a correction: email [email protected] with the URL, the exact sentence and the source that shows what it should say. We reply within two business days. Corrections of user-submitted arguments follow the fact-checking policy instead.
Comments and user content
User arguments are not edited for content by us except as described in the community guidelines. Where a moderator changes a label on an argument, the change and its reason are visible on the argument.
Transparency reporting
We intend to publish an annual transparency report covering: moderation actions by category, fact-check requests and outcomes, corrections issued, sponsorships accepted and refused, and government or legal requests received.