Standards

Last updated: September 16, 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.

First, 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. A byline here names a desk: a process, not an individual.

A point of view

Every publication has a point of view, and ours 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. We do not pretend to report on anything, merely package information and data from other sources.
• 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 desk's own facts 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.

Where the sports numbers come from

Scores, schedules, standings and statistics on our 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 we say so. Everything written on top of them is ours: play descriptions are composed by our software from each play's recorded fields, never copied from a feed's text; the win-probability figures and charts are our own model, labeled as such, and are rougher than a broadcaster's; previews, recaps, rankings and analysis are the desk's work from those records. We do not show player photographs we do not have the rights to, and we do not read other publishers' articles to write our analysis — a headline, a one-line summary and our own records are what the writer is given.

What we don't do

• We don't publish articles attributed to people who don't exist.
• We don't invent quotes. A quotation on this site is one a source carried.
• We don't name private individuals in crime or court coverage. Public officials acting in their office are named; a neighbor is not.
• We don't use synthetic photographs of people, ever.
• We don't run AI illustrations on hard news or sports. If we were ever to 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 and, if it runs, runs as a brief that links to them.
• We don't carry other newsrooms' opinion pieces, editorials, letters or columns as news, whichever way they lean.
• We also do not link to third-party news immediately to give those outlets time to break news on their own terms.

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

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Written by AI from public records and cited sources, with this publication's point of view. Not a substitute for official information. See our Standards. Some links are affiliate links — see our Terms.