How Polaris News works

Reporting here is automated

Polaris articles are written by automated reporters, which are configured software using a language model, from documents published by the organizations responsible for the events described. Every article says so on the article itself, not only here.

A language model is not a source of fact, and we do not treat it as one. It is given retrieved material and may write only what that material supports. Before anything is published, each draft is checked mechanically against its own evidence: a paragraph citing no source is rejected, a figure that does not appear in the sources cited for it is rejected, and a quotation that cannot be found in the evidence is rejected. A draft failing any of those cannot be published without a person explicitly overriding the failure.

Each desk is listed with what it covers, what it is permitted to publish without a person, and the style targets it is held to. See the desks.

Those checks compare text. They can tell that a figure is not in the source it cites, because that is a comparison of characters. They cannot tell that a sentence says the opposite of the document behind it, because both are made of words. So a second automated reader checks every draft against its evidence with one question: does each paragraph say what its source says? It is a fact checker and not a copy editor. It is given no opinion about style, and a draft it says contradicts its own source cannot be published.

Some beats are never automatic. Court reporting carries statutory constraints: publication bans under the Criminal Code, and identity protection under the Youth Criminal Justice Act. Drafts touching them are held for a person regardless of any other setting.

We go to the source

We obtain information as close as practical to the organization, authority, dataset or document responsible for the underlying event. A wildfire is reported from the agency managing it; a bill from the parliamentary record; a recall from the regulator issuing it.

We do not crawl the open web. Polaris reads a registry of 83 registered endpoints from 49 organizations, each admitted deliberately and each auditable. That registry is published.

Evidence, and what it means

Every article ends with the material it was built from: the issuing organization, the document, and the time we retrieved it, which is not the same as when it was published. We keep what we received, so a claim can be traced to the thing that supports it rather than to our summary of it.

A source item is evidence, not a story. Several departments reporting the same evacuation is one story supported by several documents, not several stories.

Continuing stories

A developing event is followed as one continuing story with distinct phases, rather than as a series of disconnected articles. A wildfire moves from discovery to evacuation to containment to resolution; a bill from introduction to committee to passage. Each phase may produce an article, and the story keeps them together.

Additional evidence does not automatically produce another article. Material that only confirms what we already reported is kept as evidence and changes nothing a reader sees. That is deliberate: the number of documents about an event is not a measure of how much news there is.

Comments

Readers can comment on articles. Every comment is read by a person before it appears, which is not a courtesy: a publication is answerable for what it hosts once it knows about it, and “nobody read it” is not an answer that improves with time.

We remove abuse, and anything that could identify a person protected by a publication ban or by the Youth Criminal Justice Act. We do not remove comments for disagreeing with us. Where we reply, the reply is labelled as coming from Polaris.

You do not need an account. A name and a comment is all we ask; an email address is optional, never published, and never used to write to you about anything else.

We store a one-way hash of the address a comment came from, never the address itself. It is enough to stop a flood and to block someone abusing the form, and it is not a record of who read what.

Commenting is open to readers in Canada. We work that out from the address your connection comes from, compared against the regional registries’ published allocation data. It is approximate and it will be wrong sometimes. If you are in Canada and cannot comment, a VPN or your provider’s routing is the likely reason. Write to hello@polarisnews.ca and we will sort it out. We do not accept comments sent through commercial VPNs, proxies or hosting providers, because almost all of what arrives that way is automated.

Corrections

When we get something wrong we correct it in public and the correction stays on the article permanently. We do not silently edit a published claim. Every correction is also listed in one place.

If you believe something here is wrong, write to corrections@polarisnews.ca and tell us which article and which claim.

What we do not do

• We do not publish claims the cited evidence does not support.
• We do not reproduce other outlets’ reporting as our own.
• We do not present a machine-written article as the work of a person.
• We do not use an image without establishing that we are permitted to.

Contact

General enquiries: hello@polarisnews.ca
Tips: tips@polarisnews.ca
Corrections: corrections@polarisnews.ca

Our automated reader identifies itself as PolarisNewsBot and respects robots.txt. What it does, and how to stop it.