How we write

Every PentaPost brief is written by PentaPost from the facts in the sources named beneath it, and links to the original report. This page explains how.

How a brief is made

1. The engine reads approved sources: official government feeds, local publishers' own news feeds, and an open global news index.
2. Reports about the same event are grouped. Two outlets carrying the same wire story count as one source, not two.
3. Most stories get a short brief written from a fixed template that uses only the source's headline, date and section, with the headline quoted exactly.
4. A story with two or more independent sources, or a local report with enough detail, gets a longer brief. The engine first lists the facts each source states, with who said them and how sure they were. The writer then works only from that list, never from the article text itself.
5. When sources disagree on a count or a cause, the story is held for an editor and not published.

Headlines

A short brief shows the original publisher's headline exactly as published, because a headline is a short statement of fact; the publisher is named beneath it as the primary source, with a link to the full report. A longer, in-depth brief has a headline, standfirst and text that PentaPost writes itself from the facts in every source listed.

This is the practice of news aggregators and search engines: the headline, the publisher's name directly beneath it, and a link to the full report. Where a publisher's terms restrict reuse, the card shows only the topic and "Report from" with the publisher's name and the link. Articles are republished in full only when they are in the public domain or their licence allows it, with a licence box and a link to the original.

Weather

The weather card shows the current conditions, today's high and low and the next three forecast periods for your area. For places in the United States the forecast comes from the National Weather Service forecast API, whose material is open data, free to use for any purpose. Elsewhere it comes from MET Norway (the Norwegian Meteorological Institute), under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 and Norwegian Licence for Open Government Data 2.0 licences, credited on the card as "Weather data from MET Norway". PentaPost asks each service at most every 30 minutes and no sooner than the service's own cache time, identifies itself in every request, and shows the card only when there is a current forecast or an official alert.

Place names

The location search uses place names from GeoNames, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, together with the towns of each PentaPost market. Your choice is kept only in your browser.

The AI assistant and the checks

An AI model helps list the facts and write the longer briefs. It works under automatic checks that run before anything is published:

• every sentence must cite at least one listed fact;
• no run of ten or more words may match a source, and the share of matching phrases is capped;
• a quotation must be exact, short, attributed, and a small part of the brief;
• hedges such as "police said" or "preliminary" are kept, and estimates stay estimates.

A brief that fails a check is not published. The story falls back to the short template brief instead.

No copying

PentaPost does not copy, shorten or rearrange a publisher's text. Briefs are written in our own words from the facts, with a link to the full original report. Official safety instructions are the one exception: they are quoted exactly, in full, and labelled as the issuing agency's words, because paraphrasing them is the risk.

Our sources

• Government feeds: the National Weather Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Hurricane Center, FEMA, the U.S. Department of State and NASA. Their material is U.S. Government work in the public domain.
• Local publishers: in the Piedmont Triad, WFMY News 2, FOX8 WGHP, WXII 12 News and the Greensboro News & Record. We read their public news feeds. Our fetcher identifies itself, obeys each site's robots file, reads only the feed when a site blocks AI crawlers, and never goes past a paywall or a login.
• Voice of America: text produced by VOA is in the public domain. We credit VOA and leave out any item VOA carries from a news agency.
• The GDELT Project: an open global index of news coverage, used to find world and national reports. Each report belongs to its publisher, who is named and linked.
• World and national public sources: GDACS disaster alerts, UN News, the World Health Organization, GOV.UK, the European Commission, the European Environment Agency, the Government of Canada, the U.S. Department of Labor, GeoNet and New Zealand Police. Each is used under its own published terms, which we record with the licence sentence and its address.
• Sport and education: the sports feeds of the three Triad stations, and Wake Forest University's news feed, read the same way as the stations' news feeds.

Our fetcher obeys each site's robots file. The one exception is an official data service whose operator publishes documentation inviting programs to use it, such as the National Weather Service API; each such exception is recorded with the operator's own words.

Google News is not a PentaPost source. News agencies such as AP and Reuters are not used until PentaPost holds a licence.

Cited source: The GDELT Project, https://www.gdeltproject.org/.

Read on PentaPost

Some sources allow their articles to be republished in full: government texts in the public domain, and publishers whose licence or written policy permits it. For those, a card offers "Read on PentaPost": the full article on our site, with a box above it naming the publisher, the licence and the date, and a link to the original. We make no edits. Licences that allow only noncommercial use are not republished until PentaPost's commercial status is settled.

Hot Now

Hot Now has three tiers: World, your country, and your region. The World tier is the same for every reader; the country and region tiers follow your edition. Each story is scored by how large it is (casualties, magnitude, alert level), how many independent sources confirm it, the kind of story, and how fresh it is; in the World tier, also by how far its consequences reach. Each tier shows two stories and opens to eight. When a tier has nothing yet, it says so.

One story per event, many topics

The same event reported by several sources is one story with a source line for each, never several cards. Each section of the page shows at most two stories from any one topic among its first ten, so you see news, politics, sport, health and more side by side; "More in" links open the rest of a topic.

For each topic and place we count the stories we hold. Where a topic is empty because no open source covers it, we name the gap rather than hide it.

Labels

Every brief carries a label: an official public-safety alert, a brief from official sources, a brief from external reporting, or a brief from multiple sources. Each one says "Written by PentaPost from the sources below" and lists every source it used.

Corrections

Corrections and requests to remove a source go to the PentaPost editor. Write to [email protected]. A corrected brief is rewritten, checked again and recorded as a new revision.