About / Standards & AI Use
How we report, and where AI fits.
We report from public records, government meetings, and official filings, and we correct the record when we get something wrong. This page is our full accounting of both: the rules every story follows, and the exact boundaries on where automation is and isn’t allowed near your news.
Editorial Standards
Neutral isn’t a slogan here. It’s three enforced rules.
Nonpartisan coverage doesn’t happen by default in county politics. It takes rules that hold even when a story is unpopular with a source, an advertiser, or a reader. These three are non-negotiable, and every PagPol byline is bound by them.
01 — No endorsements
02 — Disclosed affiliations
03 — Vote, not opinion
Story Process
Every story follows the same five steps.
Regardless of county, desk, or deadline pressure, no story reaches publication without passing through all five stages below, in order.
1. Record request
We pull the primary document. The meeting minutes, the budget resolution, the filed vote all directly from the county or municipal clerk. Press releases and campaign summaries are never the source document.
2. Independent read
A reporter reads the full record before writing, not a summary provided by a legislator’s office or campaign.
3. Two-source confirmation
Any claim beyond the document itself like intent, context, or dispute, needs a second, named source on record. Anonymous sourcing requires managing-editor sign-off and is disclosed as anonymous in the story.
4. Standards review
A second editor checks the story against the source documents before publication, specifically for partisan framing and unattributed characterizations.
5. Open correction log
Errors are corrected in place with a dated, visible note — never silently edited. See the corrections log further down this page.
Our Use of AI
AI touches the shop floor. It doesn’t touch the reporting.
PagPol is a nonpartisan New York State politics newsroom covering all 57 upstate counties. We use AI tools the way a wire desk uses a copy fitter, for structure and formatting, and we draw a hard line at anything that could shape what a story says.
Where AI is used
Early drafts. Formatting county data tables and vote tallies into our standard layout, ahead of editor review.
Organizing public records. Sorting and tagging filings, agendas, and minutes as they come in from clerks’ offices, before a reporter reads the source documents.
Day-to-day site maintenance. Structural and templating work on pagpol.com, never the words in a byline story.
Human review, every time. No AI-touched text, draft or maintenance copy, reaches the site without an editor reading it against the primary source first.
Where AI is prohibited
Original analysis or investigative reporting. The judgment calls that make a story a story stay with a named reporter and editor.
Quotes. No quote is generated, paraphrased into a quote, or reconstructed by a model.
Factual claims without human verification. Every fact-check is sourced to a named, linked primary document, confirmed by an editor before publication.
Unlabeled use near a byline. If AI assistance touched a published story beyond formatting, that’s disclosed at the bottom of the piece.
Accountability
Corrections, on the record.
We commit to correcting errors, whether human- or AI-assisted in origin, visibly and in place. Recent corrections across all counties:
Sep 2, 2026 — Saratoga County budget digest. corrected a transposed vote count in the Article 8 resolution table (7–2, not 2–7).
Aug 21, 2026 — Rensselaer school board watch. updated the meeting date after the clerk’s office issued a corrected agenda.
Aug 6, 2026 — Warren County bill-action tracker. removed a characterization of a supervisor’s motive that lacked a named on-record source.
Reach Us
See something wrong? Tell the desk.
These standards are reviewed on a rolling basis by the PagPol editorial desk and were last revised in September 2026. Where a rule on this page conflicts with an older stated practice, this page is the current one.
Flag a suspected violation, a factual error, or an AI-assisted passage that wasn’t disclosed, and it goes straight to standards review. Contact the newsroom or send us information.