Editorial Standards

These are the rules every article must follow before it publishes. They are enforced by author prompts, automated validation, and staff review — not hope.

Sourcing

  • Every article cites published industry sources: trade press, regulator filings, earnings releases, and primary documents.
  • A minimum of one primary source per article; corroborating secondary sources are required when the story makes a numerical or regulatory claim.
  • Titles of source items are checked against a title blacklist before an article can be drafted, so blocked topics never enter the pipeline.

Quotes and attribution

  • Quoted text must appear verbatim in the source. An automated quote validator compares every quoted string in a draft against the original source text; drafts that fail validation carry a visible flag in the editor and cannot be approved without a reviewer override.
  • Quotes are attributed to named speakers, never to "an executive" or "a source."
  • Source publications themselves are not named in prose — the article is the reporting, not a retelling of someone else's reporting.

Numbers, dates, and figures

  • Rate changes, dollar figures, percentage movements, dates, deadlines, and docket numbers must come from the sources. If the sources disagree, the article acknowledges the disagreement rather than picking one number.
  • Operational implications ("what this means for carriers this week") are reasoned from the source material, not invented.

Restricted topics

  • Stories touching on criminal allegations, indictments, or named-person wrongdoing trigger a mandatory human review flag and cannot be auto-published.
  • Personal information about non-public individuals is not included, even when available in a source.

AI assistance and human review

  • Drafts are produced by large language models working under strict author personas. The personas enforce verbatim quoting, source-grounded reasoning, and banned-phrase lists.
  • A staff reviewer reads every article before it publishes. No article is published without human approval.
  • All subsequent edits — whether human or AI-assisted — re-run the quote validator.

Length

There is no minimum or maximum word count. The length of an article is whatever the material supports: if the sources are thin, the article is short; if the implications run deep, the article runs longer. Padding is not acceptable.

Publication and updates

  • Every article shows a clear publish date and, when updated, a clear modified date.
  • Articles are not silently edited to change factual content. If a material correction is made, it is logged on the Corrections page.