Editorial Standards

US In News publishes two kinds of work: news synthesis compiled from broadcast coverage, and evergreen guides written from primary sources. Both run through the same verification pass before they go live. This page describes what actually happens, not what we hope to do.

Where facts come from

News stories are compiled from transcripts of identified broadcasts — ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, Bloomberg and comparable outlets. We work from the transcript text itself, not from summaries of it. Every story names the outlets it was compiled from in a sources line at the foot of the piece.

Evergreen guides. We do not currently publish evergreen destination guides. The standard we will hold them to, if we do: primary sources only — the National Park Service, state park systems, official tourism boards, and the operating organisation's own published pages. A guide sourced from a blog or a travel aggregator does not get published. Each guide will carry the date its details were verified and a link to the official page, because hours and fees change.

A writer may not use knowledge that was not retrieved during the work. If a claim cannot be traced to a specific transcript or a specific fetched page, it does not appear in the article.

The verification pass

After a story is drafted, a separate verification pass checks every factual claim against the same source material the draft was built from. This is an independent step with its own reading of the sources — it is not the writer re-reading their own work.

Claims that cannot be verified are removed. They are not softened into hedged language, and they are not rewritten as attributed speculation. A sentence that survives the pass is one the sources support. This is the single most important rule in our process, and it is the one most often broken elsewhere: an unverifiable claim wearing the word "reportedly" is still an unverifiable claim.

Drafts are also rejected for inventing a quotation, stating a contested number flatly, attributing to "reports" or "sources" without naming an outlet, or fabricating a statistic, date, or name.

Attribution

We attribute by name. "According to CBS Evening News coverage." "CENTCOM said." "Per the National Park Service." We do not write "reports say," "sources indicate," or "it is understood." Those phrases hide the fact that nobody has been named, which is usually why they are used.

Quotations are verbatim. A string inside quotation marks appears exactly that way in the source transcript or the fetched page. We do not paraphrase inside quotes.

Where sources disagree

When outlets report different figures, we report the disagreement. We do not silently pick the number we find most plausible. A story will say that reporting placed a toll at 17 or 18 depending on whether a missing service member was counted, and it will say which outlet gave which figure.

Resolving a discrepancy invisibly gives the reader false confidence and destroys the information that the discrepancy itself carries. If we later learn which figure was correct, that is a correction, and it is logged as one.

Automation and editorial oversight

Our production pipeline is automated. Stories are assembled from source transcripts by software, checked by an automated verification pass against those same transcripts, and published under desk bylines. Article videos are generated from the article text. Images are selected from Wikimedia Commons by a script that enforces a licence and author gate.

We state this plainly because it is a fact about how the site works, and a reader is entitled to know it. Editorial oversight, standards, and final accountability rest with Chris Simpson, the editor-in-chief. The desks — World, Tech, Business, Science, Politics, Newsroom — are editorial identities covering defined beats. They are not individual human reporters, and we do not present them as such.

Automation changes who does the work. It does not change the standard the work is held to. An automated pipeline that removes unverifiable claims is more rigorous than a human one that hedges them, and less rigorous than either is a pipeline nobody is accountable for. Ours has a named editor.

Challenging a story

If you believe something we published is wrong, write to corrections@usinnews.com with the article URL and the specific claim at issue. Point us at the source that contradicts it if you have one. We check the claim against the material the story was built from and respond to you either way — including when we conclude the story was right.

Editorial complaints that are not factual corrections — framing, emphasis, what we chose to cover — go to editor@usinnews.com and reach the editor-in-chief directly.

Our corrections policy sets out the four correction types and how each is displayed.