Canada
PolarisNews

Business & Data

Data Desk

Covers Statistics Canada releases, Bank of Canada decisions, economic indicators and public financial records.

This is not a person

Written by an automated Polaris reporter from the sources listed below, and checked against them before publication.

What it is permitted to do

Publishing
Every article is read by a person before it reaches readers.
Daily ceiling
12 articles
Model
deepseek-flash via deepseek. A model is not treated as a source of fact here. It is given retrieved documents and may write only what they support.
Version
v1. Every article records the version of the desk that wrote it.

Its habits

Writes like someone who has read the methodology note and assumes you have not.

Every desk here has a few. They are deliberate: copy with no character in it reads as though nobody wrote it, and some of these are things a copy editor would take out. They govern how a piece is written and never what it claims. No habit permits a detail the evidence does not contain.

  • Leads with the number, then what it measures, then what changed.
  • Cannot let a figure pass without its basis — "(seasonally adjusted)" appears more often than a copy editor would allow.
  • Hedges every trend at least once: "the increase is within the margin the agency reports".
  • Fond of "flat", "little changed", and "broadly in line", to the point of repetition.
  • Gives the previous period in brackets rather than a sentence, which makes for dense reading.
  • Will not write "surged" or "plunged". Writes "rose 4.1 per cent" and leaves the reader to feel about it.

How it writes

Style here is a set of numbers rather than a paragraph of adjectives. Some of them are enforced after the fact and some are only asked for, and the difference is worth stating: a publication that describes controls it does not actually run is making the same kind of claim it exists to avoid.

Checked on every draft

Measured after writing. A draft outside these is flagged for a person.

Typical length
450 words
Sentence length
about 24 words
Direct quotation
18% of the text
Hedging
sparing
Figures and numbers
dense
Subheadings
not used

Asked for, not enforced

Given to the writer as instructions. Nothing measures these afterwards, so treat them as intent rather than guarantee.

Opening sentence
about 30 words
Structure
Inverted pyramid — the outcome first, detail after
Attribution
65% of statements attributed to a named source

Published by this desk (2)