communities.news

Editorial Formula

"The transcript is raw material; the formula is yours — we just run the still."

— Lee Brown

The Communities News pipeline extracts journalism from public meetings. The extraction itself is mechanical. The choices that shape what gets extracted are editorial. This page documents the architecture of those choices.

It does not document the current parameters of any specific choice. Those parameters live in operational documents that the editorial team is actively refining. The architecture stays stable; the parameters evolve as the team learns what produces stronger primary-source-grounded journalism. That separation is deliberate.

Four layers

Every published article passes through, or is shaped by, four layers of editorial decision-making. Each layer governs a different kind of choice.

1. The structural pipeline

The mechanical extraction process from public meeting to draft article. The pipeline is content-neutral: it transcribes, identifies speakers, classifies statements, extracts facts and quotes, drafts the article against those facts, verifies the result, and routes the draft to human editorial review. The pipeline is documented in detail at How It Works. It is the same for every newsroom on the platform.

2. Platform-wide editorial standards

A set of editorial rules that apply to every newsroom on the platform. The platform team curates these standards and propagates them as defaults to every newsroom. Each rule can be configured at the newsroom level if a community has reason to vary it, and each newsroom can choose how strictly any given rule is enforced.

What this layer governs at a high level: the kind of editorial discipline that should be consistent across newsrooms regardless of the community being covered. The specific rules at any given moment are private to the editorial team that maintains them, and they evolve.

3. Per-community editorial brief

Each newsroom maintains a brief specific to its audience and the place it covers. The brief tells the platform's drafting and coverage-decision systems who the audience is, what context the audience already carries, and how to frame stakes for that community.

The brief differs across newsrooms because communities differ. Alaska News covers Alaska; a future newsroom covering a different state will write to a different audience with different assumed context. The brief is the layer where that difference lives. Specific community briefs are private to the editorial teams that maintain them.

4. The six principles

Above the three operational layers are six durable editorial commitments. These are abstract enough to survive the iteration that the lower layers undergo, and they are what every operational rule and brief is ultimately accountable to.

  1. Public Impact First. Statements affecting residents' daily lives are weighted highest.
  2. Accountability. Every claim traces to its source.
  3. Proportional Representation. Perspectives are preserved, not flattened to false equivalence.
  4. Preserve Tension. When statements conflict, the tension stays visible — it is not editorially resolved.
  5. Local Context. Community-specific anchoring over generic framing.
  6. Uncertainty Explicit. Claims without evidence are tagged as claims, not facts; refusals are visible.

Each principle is operationalized across one or more of the lower layers. A reader who wants to know exactly how a principle is currently implemented can follow the work into the relevant operational layer; what's on this page is the durable commitment, not the current implementation.

Why this page is meta

Most newsrooms publish a "standards" page that lists current commitments. Those pages tend to be defensive artifacts: they exist to defend the publisher against accusations of bias by enumerating positions. They also tend to go stale, because the operational reality drifts as editors learn.

This page is structural. It documents the architecture of how editorial choices get made and where, so a reader can understand the layered system without locking the page to the current state of any specific layer. The architecture stays stable as the operational layers evolve, which means the page can be trusted to remain accurate over time rather than becoming a snapshot that grows out of date.

If you want to know what an operational layer currently looks like, the right approach is to read the journalism. Every article on a Communities News newsroom is a manifestation of all four layers, applied to a specific public meeting in a specific community. The article is the evidence; this page is the framework.

What this means for new community newsrooms

The architecture is platform-wide. Every newsroom on the platform applies the same four-layer system and is accountable to the same six principles. The operational specifics differ across newsrooms — every community has a different audience, different recurring contexts, different stakes — but the architecture that holds those specifics together does not.

When a new community brings a newsroom online with Communities News, the platform-wide layers (the structural pipeline and the platform-wide editorial standards) come with it. The new newsroom writes its own per-community editorial brief. The six principles guide both.