How Polaris News works

Our editorial approach

Polaris News is human-directed and uses AI tools. Stories may be written by human authors, prepared with AI assistance, or produced through our automated reporting workflow. Our source registry, coverage priorities and publishing standards are selected and maintained by people. Our reporting is grounded in the documents and records behind each story.

We use language-model tools to assist with preparing coverage, comparing sources, checking claims and reviewing writing, alongside other research and production tasks. These tools work within our editorial rules. Stories that pass the required checks may publish automatically; individual human review is not part of every story.

Source documents remain the authority. Checks compare citations, quotations and figures against the retrieved evidence. Tool-assisted review also checks whether the writing accurately reflects that evidence. Major stories receive an additional verification pass. These checks can miss things, so we provide source links and a public corrections process.

Our desks have defined areas of coverage and editorial styles. See the desks.

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.

Other news outlets are never our sources. We read some of them to learn what is happening, but when one of their reports points to a story, we follow its links back to the documents it was based on, such as the studio's announcement, the ministry's release or the court's decision, and write from those. If a report links to no primary document, or rests only on the outlet's own reporting, we do not write the story. Where a document we use quotes something said to a news outlet, that sentence is left out of what we write from.

We do not crawl the open web. Polaris reads a registry of 1121 registered endpoints from 1004 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. Each paragraph is numbered against that list, so you can see which document supports which sentence. 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 imply that a person reviewed a story when they did not.
• 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.