How this desk works

1. What this desk publishes, and what it refuses

Newsroom Horizon publishes explanatory material about how digital journalism is produced, distributed, funded and disclosed. It is a reference, not a news service: pages describe mechanisms that persist rather than events that happened yesterday. That choice determines almost everything else about the method. A page that has to remain accurate for a year cannot rest on a single announcement, cannot be written from a press release, and has to state plainly which parts of its subject are still contested.

The refusals are equally deliberate. This desk does not review or rank commercial tools, does not reproduce vendor benchmarks, does not publish predictions about what any technology will do next, and does not name individual practitioners or construct case studies around unverifiable people. It publishes no monetary figures of any kind. And it does not answer legal questions: where a subject turns on defamation, privacy, copyright, contempt or data protection, the page says so and directs the reader to a qualified professional.

2. The sourcing hierarchy

Not all sources carry the same weight, and the ranking below is applied consistently rather than case by case. The general rule is that a claim should rest on the most direct available record, and that commentary about a document never substitutes for the document. Where only secondary material is available, the page says so in the sentence rather than in a footnote.

3. How a page is drafted

Drafting begins with a scope note: what the page will cover, what it will not, and which questions a reader should be able to answer after reading it. The scope note is written before any research, which prevents the common failure in which a page expands to cover whatever material happened to be easy to find.

Sections are then outlined and numbered. The numbering is not decoration: it makes the page citable at section level, forces each section to be self-contained, and exposes gaps in the argument at outline stage rather than at the end. Only then is prose written, section by section, with sources attached as the sentences are drafted rather than reconstructed afterwards. Tables and checklists are written last, from the finished text, so they summarise what the page actually says instead of what it was intended to say.

4. Verification before publication

Every page passes a claim-level check before it is published. The draft is reduced to a list of its checkable assertions — every number, date, instrument name, institution, technical claim and description of practice — and each is located in a source at the appropriate tier. Anything that cannot be located is removed rather than hedged, because a hedge preserves an unsupported claim while transferring the risk to the reader.

Descriptions of legal instruments receive an additional pass. The test applied is whether the sentence would still be accurate if the reader treated it as a summary of the general shape of the obligation and then read the text themselves. Sentences that only work if the reader assumes more precision than the source supports are rewritten. Where scope depends on the role a service plays, the page says that explicitly instead of implying universal application.

5. Machine assistance in producing this site

This desk applies to itself the disclosure standard it describes elsewhere. Machine assistance is used for mechanical work: spelling and consistency checks, searching within collected material, and checking that terminology is used the same way across pages. Every sentence published here has been written and verified by a person, and no page contains generated prose that has been published substantially as generated.

All artwork on the site — the mark, the panel illustration and the social card — is hand-written vector code rather than generated imagery. No photographs are used, which removes the question entirely. If that position changes, the change will be recorded on this page with a date, and any affected page will carry a disclosure line naming the stage, the artefact and the human check applied to it.

6. Numbers, units and worked examples

Worked examples on this site use neutral units only: items, words, minutes, hours, frames, sample counts and percentages. There are no monetary amounts anywhere, which is a deliberate constraint rather than an oversight — money examples invite readers to treat an illustration as a recommendation, and this site makes no recommendations.

Arithmetic is shown rather than asserted. Where a page performs a calculation, the formula appears in a code block so a reader can check it, and the accompanying note states what the result does not mean. The interactive calculator in the first analysis follows the same rule: it computes three simple ratios, displays the formulas, validates its inputs, and states in the surrounding text that it is an arithmetic illustration and not a staffing recommendation.

7. Naming institutions

Public bodies are named where they are relevant, using their correct current names: Coimisiún na Meán, the Press Council of Ireland and the Office of the Press Ombudsman, the Central Statistics Office, the Data Protection Commission, and the European instruments that apply. Where a body has been superseded — the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, whose codes remain a reference point — the page says so rather than implying a current function.

Naming is neutral and factual. This site claims no membership of, recognition by, accreditation from, endorsement by or supervision by any regulator, representative body, university or publisher, and no such relationship exists. Institution names appear as plain text rather than as outbound links, so that a reader is never given the impression that a body has associated itself with this material.

8. The review cycle

Pages are reviewed on a schedule rather than when someone remembers. The cycle below runs continuously across the site, with each page reaching the full sequence at least once every twelve months and sooner if a cited instrument changes materially or a described practice visibly moves.

1. Trigger A scheduled date, a material change to a cited instrument, a reader correction, or a described practice that has visibly changed.
2. Re-read against sources Every checkable claim on the page is located again in its source, and any source that has moved or been superseded is replaced.
3. Scope check The page is compared against its original scope note; material that has drifted outside it is removed or moved.
4. Language pass Hedges, dates and qualifications are checked for accuracy, and any sentence that now reads as advice is rewritten.
5. Link and structure pass Internal links, section anchors, table captions and heading order are verified.
6. Publish and record The revised page replaces the previous version, with a correction note where a substantive claim changed.

9. Corrections and complaints

Corrections are made in place. The amended page carries a note stating what was wrong, what it now says, and when the change was made; where the original wording matters to anyone who quoted it, that wording is retained in the note. Pages are not silently edited, and pages are not deleted to resolve a complaint, because deletion removes the record without removing the error.

The correction route is the email address on the contact page, or the short form on the same page, which asks for a name, a reply address, a subject and the message and nothing else. Either reaches the same desk. A correction request is most useful when it names the page, quotes the exact sentence, explains why it may be wrong and points to a source. Receipt is acknowledged where practical, and substantive requests receive a response within five working days.

10. Technical and accessibility choices

The site is static HTML with one stylesheet and one script, both served from this domain. There are no external requests of any kind: no hosted fonts, no content delivery network, no embedded video, no social widgets, no measurement tag and no advertising tag. System font stacks are used throughout. These choices make the site fast, private by construction and possible to archive in full.

Accessibility is treated as part of the build rather than an audit afterwards: a skip link on every page, semantic landmarks, one level-one heading per page, visible focus outlines, a captioned table wherever tabular data appears, text alternatives on every image, an accessible name on the navigation control, and a reduced-motion rule. The accessibility page sets out the known limitations and the route for reporting a barrier.

11. What this method cannot deliver

A careful method reduces error; it does not eliminate it. Some subjects on this site are moving quickly enough that a page can be accurate on the day it is published and misleading six months later, which is why review dates matter more than initial accuracy. Some descriptions of practice are necessarily generalised and will not match any particular newsroom. And some of the underlying evidence — on how ranked distribution affects what people believe, for instance — is genuinely unsettled, so the pages describe the state of the evidence rather than resolving it.

Nor can a method substitute for professional judgement in the reader’s own situation. Nothing here has been written with any particular organisation, jurisdiction or legal position in mind. Where a decision has legal or data-protection consequences, this site is a starting point for understanding the question, not a source of an answer.

The standard applied to every page

• A scope note was written before research began.
• Every checkable claim is located in a source at the appropriate tier.
• Legal instruments are described by shape and the reader is sent to the text.
• Contested evidence is described as contested.
• Worked examples use neutral units and contain no monetary figures.
• Institutions are named as plain text, with no claim of any relationship.
• Sections are numbered and self-contained so they can be cited precisely.
• Tables carry captions and checklists are written from the finished text.
• The page carries a review commitment and a correction route.
• No generated prose is published substantially as generated.

Questions about the method