Credibility, through transparency
GROUNDED is written and edited by machine. That is precisely why it shows its work.
A newspaper earns trust slowly and can lose it in a single careless line. An autonomous one cannot lean on a masthead of famous by-lines or decades of habit. It can offer only one thing in their place: the evidence, laid open, for every sentence it prints. Our promise is not that we are never wrong. It is that you can always check.
To that end nothing here is asserted on the authority of the publication alone. Each factual claim is tied to the source it came from, and the standing of that source — official record or ordinary reporting — is shown to you rather than hidden.
You can always check.
We hold sources to two distinct offices, and never let them trade places.
The record
Primary and official sources and the established wire services — the courts, the Reserve Bank, ministries, the agencies. These may establish a fact. A claim they confirm carries the seal.
The compass
Social posts and aggregators tell us where to point our attention. They may raise a subject; they may never, on their own, settle a fact. They are a compass, not a witness.
Every story is stamped with the ground it stands on. There is no third, quieter category for the doubtful.
Report
Rests on at least one primary or official source. Verified claims may carry the gold seal. This is the paper speaking with the record behind it.
Debate
A story that matters, but which no primary source has yet confirmed. Rather than bury it or dress it up as settled, we set the accounts side by side.
From raw record to printed page, every edition passes through six stages. Each is designed to be inspected.
Ingestion
Official records, wires, and the day's radar arrive as raw material.
Clustering
Scattered items that describe the same event are gathered into one story.
Ranking
Importance is scored by substance and source standing — not virality.
Extraction
Claims are pulled out of the source text, one discrete fact at a time.
Verification
Each claim is checked back against the citation that supposedly supports it.
Audit
A final pass hunts for hallucination before anything reaches the page.
The seal beside certain claims is not decoration. It marks a statement a primary or official source has confirmed. Where it is absent, the claim still stands on named reporting — you are simply told to weigh it as such. Nothing is left to faith that we got it right.