Editorial standards

Stories and guides on Springs Daily are written with AI assistance from cited public sources and checked automatically.

No person reviews or edits a story before it publishes. The rest of this page explains where the facts come from, what is checked, and what happens when a page falls short.

A news story is drafted from the reports that other news organizations and public agencies have published about the same event. When several outlets have covered it, the draft is written from several of their reports together, not from one.

The draft cites the reports it draws on, and the story lists every report it cites, by outlet and headline, under Sources. A story that cites no report cannot be published, whether automatically or by hand.

The development, restaurant inspection, health and water pages are built from official public records. Older guides to restaurants, activities and places were built from business listing data (such as Google, Yelp and Viator listings) rather than first-hand visits.

Before a news story publishes, automated checks run on it. It publishes only if it passes all of them:

• It cites at least one published report.
• A second AI pass checks each claim against the cited reports and gives the draft a quality score. A draft below the bar is not published automatically.
• It does not copy a source's wording: twelve or more consecutive words of one report outside quotation marks, or more than sixty quoted words, blocks it.
• It contains no AI refusal or commentary text, its content matches its topic, and it has enough substance of its own.
• No more than six stories publish automatically in a day, and automatic publishing can be switched off at any time.

A draft that fails a check is not published.

A page that is already published but does not meet these standards stays readable, but it is marked noindex, so search engines leave it out of their results until it is fixed. That covers, for example, an event with no description of its own, a directory listing with nothing beyond what Google already shows, and any page whose text fails the checks above. A page comes back into search on its own once it passes.

Stories found to repeat a source’s wording were retracted. Each one was rewritten and republished only if the rewrite passed the same checks.

Stories are written in our own words, and quotations are marked as quotations.

The wording check catches copied wording. It does not catch a story that follows one report paragraph by paragraph in different words, so the citation to that report is the credit it is owed.

Springs Daily does not do original reporting. No one interviews people, attends meetings or visits places for a story.

News stories are written from reports that other news organizations and public agencies have already published, and the development, restaurant inspection, health and water pages come from official public records. When a story relies on someone else’s reporting, it cites that report.

If a story reads as though Springs Daily spoke to someone or was there in person, that is an error: please report it to corrections@springsdaily.com.

A photo published with a story carries a credit line naming the photographer or source and the terms it is used under. We do not present an AI-generated image as a photograph: generated images are labeled as illustrations.

Springs Daily is free to read. Some event ticket links are affiliate links, so we may earn a commission when a reader buys tickets through them, and local businesses can advertise with us.

We do not yet have a formal written rule that keeps advertising and affiliate income apart from coverage. What exists today is how the desk works: news stories are chosen and drafted automatically from the reports other outlets and agencies have published, and cited to them. Whether a business advertises with us, or an event has an affiliate ticket link, is not part of how a story is chosen or written.

If we get something wrong, email corrections@springsdaily.com with the story link, the sentence in question and what you believe is correct. A link to your source helps.

We check the claim against the original sources and any you send. If the story was wrong, we correct it in place and the byline shows an Updated time. If the error changed the meaning of the story, we add a note saying what was wrong and when it was fixed. If a story cannot be substantiated, we retract it and say so.

• Corrections policy