Editorial policy

Who writes

Every summary carries the byline “Norwich.news desk (automated)”. The site does not invent human reporters, photographs of staff, or a newsroom address it does not have. A visible “automated summary” label sits on each story.

Two products

Data pages are counts and registers from public sources: police.uk, the Food Standards Agency, planit.org.uk, Open-Meteo, and TheSportsDB. They quote short official fields — a business name, a rating, an application description — and say where they came from. They are not news articles.

The digest is different. For each cluster of reports, the pipeline may publish two or three sentences of its own, a list of the facts it was allowed to use, and links to the original outlets. It does not republish the article, the standfirst, or any picture.

How a summary is allowed out

A story is skipped unless all of the following are true:

• It names Norwich, an NR postcode, or a Norwich neighbourhood or fringe village. A county-wide weather, water, or council item can stay when it does not name a town outside the city. Stories whose subject is somewhere else, such as Great Yarmouth or Dereham, are skipped even if the copy mentions Norwich in passing.
• At least one fact is more specific than the place and the topic: a figure, an organisation, a weather system, or a short note such as an arrest or a closure.
• There is a working link to a source.
• The summary is two or three sentences.
• No five-word sequence in the headline or summary also appears in the source text.
• The writer never received the outlet’s sentences. It received the fact list only. The default writer is a deterministic template. A real model can be plugged in later and still has to pass the same gate.

Crime, courts, and names

If a report is about a crime, a court, an inquest, or a ban, and it names a person, it is published only when every source in that cluster is an official body (police.uk, a council, or another gov.uk host). A name that arrives from a newspaper, the BBC, or Google News is enough to drop the item. The desk does not “anonymise” it and publish the rest.

Court reports that appear to involve a child are dropped unless the source is official. That includes stories which use “boy”, “girl”, “teenager”, or an age under 18 instead of a full name.

The crime data page never names suspects or victims. It publishes category totals from police.uk. Street names appear only as the anonymised “on or near” labels the police already publish, and only when a street has more than one marker.

What else is refused

Property adverts, betting tips, listicles, and outlet round-up brands (“Need to know Norfolk”) are not turned into stories. Reports about towns outside Norwich are not republished just because a Norfolk paper covered them. The edition also caps how many summaries it will publish in one run, so a busy news day does not become hundreds of near-duplicate pages.

Geography

NR1–NR7 and the Golden Triangle are editorial areas around reference points. They are not wards and they are not council boundaries. NR6 and NR7 are mostly Broadland. NR4 and NR5 are split with South Norfolk. Each hub says so. The Golden Triangle crime count overlaps NR2.

Samples are labelled

Roadworks, events, and new companies have no keyless feed in this build. Those pages show one example row, marked as an example, and explain the environment variable that turns the live feed on. They do not invent closures, fixtures, ratings, or company filings. If a live feed fails, the page says it failed.

Corrections and takedown

Anyone can ask for a correction on the corrections page or by emailing desk@norwich.news. A correction request is not published by itself. Where a summary is wrong, the fix is to change or remove the summary, not to silently edit the record of what the outlet reported.

Advertising

Slots marked “Advertisement” are empty placeholders. They are not sold campaigns and they are not links.

The privacy note is on the privacy page. Contact details are on the contact page.